The instant messaging system with eMclient is not what you would consider the traditional configuration that you think of or instant messaging. The developers have decided to go with basically third parties for their instant messaging needs. their position was to not develop directly for the various instant messaging protocols that define a third party interface option; that option is jabber, a free open-source effort that also powers Google’s instant messenger and Google wave.

the developers for eMclient will not directly connect with MSN, Yahoo! or aim, but you can sign up for a service called JabbIM.

JabbIM is a jabber protocol that is co-mingled with other instant messaging protocols.

    * Since Jabbim makes use of the modern XMPP protocol, our users can chat with users of other modern IM servers, like Google Talk, LiveJournal Talk, WP Spik, Gizmo Project, Tipic IM, Jabber.org and many others.

    * Moreover, users can access non-XMPP networks and communicate with their users via the gateways. Jabbim offers access to the closed networks like MSN, AIM, Yahoo! IM, ICQ, Gadu-Gadu as well as to the IRC.

Right now eMclient doesn’t offer a ‘true integration’ with instant messaging to these other protocols and the interface with instant messaging with eMclient, in my opinion, is far from refined.

eMclient has a lot of refinements, but in the area of instant messaging and linking the statuses of your contacts or being able to Instant Messenger contacts is not something I would consider intuitive in eMclient.

EMclient current documentation doesn’t really offer any assistance in the process of creating or understanding how the instant messaging process works, and if you’re expecting to simply go to eMclient new accounts or instant messaging and be able to select Yahoo, MSN, ICQ; it’s not going to be there.

The process of using these protocols within eMclient is completely obtuse to the common user.

In the process of trying to figure out how the instant messaging worked in eMclient, I had to create a instant messaging account with JabbIM. it’s a free service and once you create your account you’re assigned an e-mail address.

With the capabilities of JabbIM you would presume once your account has been created you can simply log into eMclient, create a new account for jabber and then the application would simply integrate directly into e-mail client, but this simply just isn’t the case.

In eMclient, create a new Jabber account.

eMclient is relying on a 3rd party to establish the connection to the other Instant Messaging protocols, but it doesn’t offer any direction in completing this process. The users are not given any information on how this is supposed to work or how to set it up.

The Instant Messaging wizard only offers ‘Jabber’; users would be expecting to see MSN, or Yahoo! or something to that nature- it’s difficult to understand, but what they’re saying here is these are Jabber servers and they offer ‘services’ to interface with other services such as MSN, Yahoo! or another Instant Message protocol. – and now I’ve a JabbIM account [this is one they recommend].

Once you select the appropriate jabber server, eMclient will automatically connect to that server. A pop-up message will indicate that this is the first time you connect it to this particular jabber server and offer you the opportunity to import your contacts into the Instant Messenger system so you can communicate.

But my experience with importing my contacts wasn’t good.

I was given the option to import my Gmail contacts, I selected the e-mail account where the contacts will be located and then I clicked on the import button; nothing happened, there was no confirmation and the import window simply disappeared.

Simply by looking at the screen and watching the actions on the screen I didn’t notice that anything had happened. After further searching, I couldn’t find the contacts in the instant messaging window and they weren’t listed anywhere in the contacts window/section.

As a eMclient user, trying to set up instant messaging, you are literally falling through the steps, bumble by bumble.

It’s extremely hard to understand the process that the developers are trying to go by when they’re creating or trying to create a connection with instant messaging protocol.

The users are completely lost in this process. I’m sure whether developers get around to it a more enhanced and intuitive connection Wizard can be created, but at the time of this observation, he was terribly difficult.

Still working with the example server of JabbIM and having created a server account, I went to the instant messaging options [instant messaging from the file menu] and chose the option to ‘service discovery’.

This is the point at which you find out what type of communication protocols this particular jabber server supports.

You select your service and then you have to enter in your credentials. after your user ID and password are entered into the system, it tries to connect- hopefully it works.

And you continue to process of selecting your instant messaging protocol.

My experience with this process was that as you add on the instant messaging protocols, it doesn’t know that you have friends or buddies and it doesn’t attempt to auto discover those contact either.

I signed up for MSN, Yahoo, ICQ and GMail… the only service that gave me any kind of status was my Gmail account and that was not created through the jabber account.

I have contacts in my address book for Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail; the only contact that were available were the ones through Gmail.

I couldn’t figure out how to get new contacts into the instant messaging system on eMclient. You can’t drag and drop contacts, you can’t right-click on e-mail addresses and add to Instant Messenger and I found no intelligent way to add contacts to Instant Messenger window.

I was really expecting to see some sort of status next to every contact that I had in my address book. I mean since I have this feature that spans so many different instant messaging protocols, and maybe assumption that I should be able to right-click and instant message is contacts or see their statuses.

While Facebook was a protocol that was listed, I never could connect to it and so I couldn’t communicate directly with my Facebook contacts.