getting chat logs

[Skgoa]

So, my stalker lied to the police. Really REALLY lied. I mean not just embelishing details but outright fabricating the big picture. She has made quite a few claims that I could easyly disprove with chat logs. Only one problem: I had and have several computers, so these logs are on at least four different drives right now, and some might even be lost. Do icq, jabber, skype and/or meebo save logs on their servers?

[Ryan Thunder]

What sort of chat clients were you using, and what OS are these computers running?

[Skgoa]

Uhm, debian, OS X, Win Xp and Win 7. Client-wise I mostly used Miranda, the standard Skype client and Meebo*. But I would rather not touch the actual drives/log files before talking to a lawyer, because I am kinda afraid of rendering these logs unusable as evidence. So server-side logs would be ideal.

* i.e. through my web browser.

[Stark]

Are local logs (ie editable text files) really considered useful evidence?

[Skgoa]

well, my idea was me and/or my lawyer handing the drives to the police and saying "look at the file system, it hasn't been touched for two years." but telling them "you can just subpoena this from Skype" would be preferable. and, well, we don't need to convict anyone, we only need to force her to stop spouting lies about me stalking her.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

Uhh . . . might be just me, but you're getting into an area where you would be better served asking these questions of an actual lawyer. But, I would guess that you'll probably end up turning the drives over to law-enforcement, since one would think that the services in question do not do keystroke-by-keystroke server-side logging of user activity.

But, again, don't rely on advice from random interweb users in nations other than your own. Get a lawyer.

[Skgoa]

Thanks. Yeah, I have an appointment with my lawyer on 2/1/2012 about how to deal with her, but I wanted to know ahead whether or not we could just prove that she is full of shit that easyly.

[Ariphaos]

Skype and ICQ log to the local machine by default. As far as I know, they've made no indication that they keep logs locally, and I think Skype messages don't even go through their own 'servers', and this used to be true for most IM clients up until a few years ago. GTalk often sends logs to e-mail.

For Jabber servers and Meebo, you'd have to ask them.

I'd ask your lawyer about the proper procedure for recovering valid logs from the drives you have. If they don't know, someone should. Ideally, you'll want to make forensic copies, and provide instructions for how to recover logs, while also providing a copy of said logs - I wouldn't knee-jerk expect the police to just be able to find them for you. You know what was said, you know what to look for. The police do not have that information, and may not have the computer skills on hand to be able to find it at all, especially if some of them are old and archaic.