recovering messages

[charlie-s]

New Here, Hello :)
hope I posted in the right forum.

I have been looking at a lot of programs to monitor activity, mainly for my daughter's computer.

As for now, is it possible to recover her AIM conversations as much as i respect her privacy there are things going on right now that require me to do such a thing.
I need to know if these are logged in a file somewhere? If not is anyone familiar with a simple easy to use program to record the AIM and other e mail's?

Thanks for any tips or links
Charlie

[Justin01]

Well, I came up with the following....

http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file_description/0,fid,47526,00.asp#

There's plenty of other sniffers out there. Didn't come across any freeware though in my short search.

[charlie-s]

I found quite a few too. I dident want to have to buy one if I could access the messages somehow.

[BeastOverlordH6]

The messages can only be obtained (without use of an outside program) if a setting within AIM is set to record the conversations to .txt files (maybe .rtf, don't remember). Even worse on your part, the AIMer in question needs to manually save conversations. And to prevent leaking of conversations, AIM is fitted with some degree of encryption.

I personally never what to see what my sister is typing. It allegedly atrophies the brain.

[charlie-s]

"I personally never what to see what my sister is typing. It allegedly atrophies the brain."

I would have to agree on this. I can't even understand what they are talking about, all the abbreviations and chat lingo.
Its almost as if it is encrypted in itself.

[BeastOverlordH6]

If you even got ahold of a chatlog, there are too many phonetic abbreviations and word alternations to know what's going on.