Pidgin is a multi-protocol instant messaging client for Linux, BSD, MacOS X, and Windows. It is compatible with AIM (Oscar and TOC protocols), ICQ, MSN Messenger, Yahoo, IRC, Jabber, Gadu-Gadu, and Zephyr networks.

Pidgin users can log in to multiple accounts on multiple IM networks simultaneously. This means that you can be chatting with friends on AOL Instant Messenger, talking to a friend on Yahoo Messenger, and sitting in an IRC channel all at the same time.

Pidgin supports many features of the various networks, such as file transfer (coming soon), away messages, typing notification, and MSN window closing notification. It also goes beyond that and provides many unique features. A few popular features are Buddy Pounces, which give the ability to notify you, send a message, play a sound, or run a program when a specific buddy goes away, signs online, or returns from idle; and plugins, consisting of text replacement, a buddy ticker, extended message notification, iconify on away, and more.

What's New in version 2.5.8:

ICQ:

• Fix misparsing a web message as an SMS message. (Yuriy Kaminskiy)

MSN:

• Increase NS command history size to prevent crashes on buddy lists that have a lot of buddies on other networks like Yahoo!.

MySpace:

• Accounts with empty buddy lists are now properly marked as connected.
• Fix receiving messages from users of MySpace IM's web client.

Yahoo:

• Fixed phantom online buddies. They should now properly disappear when signing out.
• Fixed the crashes some users were seeing with cn.scs.msg.yahoo.com in 2.5.7.
• Fixed compiling on systems with glib 2.4.x or older.
• Fixed an issue with file transfers. This may not resolve all issues, but it should resolve at least some of the most common ones.
• The pager server will automatically update to scsa.msg.yahoo.com if the user empties the field or if it is scs.msg.yahoo.com. This should ease the pain of transition to the new login method.

XMPP:

• Fix an incompatibility betweeen Prosody and libpurple clients.