Perhaps someone has answered this somewhere but I haven’t seen it nor have many readers quizzing me about it. Who saves their I.M.s? Particularly the gay saucey ones? I know that they don’t just disappear when you close the window. But they don’t exist on your harddrive unless you save them, right? I’d just like a technical Dirty I.M. Retrieval tutorial which explains how these things are being so conveniently plucked from the cyber-ether. I’m not imputing chicanery or shennanigans on anyone’s part. Nor am I excluding such behavior (nor am I suggesting that Foley himself is getting a raw deal. He knows what he did and resigned immediately because he got caught at it). I generally consider Ross to be a top flight reporter. But, I think post Memogate, some sleuthing or further explanation is order. So: Clarity please.

Update: That was fast. Several readers explain that new I.M. software — of which I am of course ignorant — does save your IM’s forever. From one such reader:

Hi Jonah!
There are some IM tools (like Trillian) that save all of your IM
conversations by default. In order for it NOT to save them, the user has to
go into the options to turn it off. I don’t know why it defaults to save,
but all in all it is a nice program since you can have IM and Yahoo chats
from one interface.

And here’s another:

Jonah,
It depends on the client. MSN Messenger saves the messages in an XML file under My DocumentsMy Received Files\history.
Google Talk actually saves your message history on their servers, which is kind of creepy.
In both cases you can specify that you don’t want you messages saved. In Google Talk you can actually go “off the record” with a contact, where your messages are temporarily not saved on either side of the conversation.