Can you retrieve IMs?

My friend called me in tears the other day because her middle school daughter has been the victim of some nasty instant message stuff by another girl she'd always considered a friend. She would like to confront the mom of the offender, but in order to do so, would like to print off what the girl wrote. My friend's daughter was so upset, she had already deleted the message off AIM before telling my friend about it. Is there a way to get an IM back after signing out of the session? Is there a "deleted messages" file somewhere, like with email? I'm sure there is, but neither my friend or I have the technological skills to figure out how to find it.

I have no idea, as I never use these services. But I expect for anybody to be able to answer this, they'd need to know what phone service is being used and the make and model of the phone.

if she has the logging feature turned on, there will be a file with the "converasation" saved to the hard drive each time IMs are sent/received.

BSQ said:

if she has the logging feature turned on, there will be a file with the "converasation" saved to the hard drive each time IMs are sent/received.

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How would I find that, and where is the logging feature?

I don't know how to retrieve what is already there but there is a program called 'big brother' that we used. It allowed to check up on our kids when we were concerned that they were in trouble.

http://www.iambigbrother.com/

Have teenagers also. Too late for this time but not next, last January I intstalled Spector Pro a program that would have saved this so I could print it out. I found out more than I wanted but glad I did.

Your friend might want to alert the school as to what is going on.

Ever seen the movie "Odd girl out" ? it addresses this sort of thing.

ctreelmom said:

How would I find that, and where is the logging feature?

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you may want to check the AIM FAQs. I use a different software and haven't used the AIM software in a while, but know it's a feature. I think it's under preferences. The files are stored in the AIM directory on your computer by user name. I can't remember if it stroes them by session or just keeps appending a file.

ctreelmom said:

My friend called me in tears the other day because her middle school daughter has been the victim of some nasty instant message stuff by another girl she'd always considered a friend. She would like to confront the mom of the offender, but in order to do so, would like to print off what the girl wrote. My friend's daughter was so upset, she had already deleted the message off AIM before telling my friend about it. Is there a way to get an IM back after signing out of the session? Is there a "deleted messages" file somewhere, like with email? I'm sure there is, but neither my friend or I have the technological skills to figure out how to find it.

Click to expand...

No offensive to your friend but I don't think she should get in the middle unless the girl threating her daughter.

We had a situation in elementary school with my dd and her friends. One of the Moms called me up about what my dd had done to her dd (it was all about a jump rope club). Anyways, the Mom went to the school during recess to supervise what was going on. Based on that she called me to confront me about it. At first, I was upset my dd was behaving this way and I was gonna ground her, etc... Well, once I talked to her I figured out the girl did not tell her Mom the whole story. She left out an important piece. She had originally told the club that she didn't want to be in the Jump rope club. Anyways, there is always two sides to the story. And, the Mom that intervenue got the how story mixed up. It was a BIG MESS to say the least. I finally told my dd that she needs to be careful around that girl.

I think, your friend's dd needs to learn how to deal with it. She needs to figure out that this girl obviously, is not a friend and needs to end the relationship.

However, if the girl threatened with bodily harm or something serious like that then, I'd definitely would talk to the parent or the school.

First off, you'd have to tell us which client she is using -- AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), MSN, or 3rd party chat/IRC client like Trillian?

I don't believe AIM has logging, but most likely if she is using one of the many third party chat clients, the logging capability is available. But then, logging would have to be enabled.

Most likely any proof of this nasty conversation is long gone by now. If your friend is concerned about future incidents, please have her look into installing a big brother type application on the computer in question.

Wait and see

I also feel that unless it was threatening the parent should try and let the child handle it. WHen it happened to my daughter about 2 months ago the only thing we said was to block the girls from her account and since they no longer went to her school we felt it would blow over. We did ask her regularly if their friend who was in one of her classes was getting involved. Since she wasn't and they were blocked from her account nothing else happened till last week. On her first bus trip ever wasn't one of the girls on the bus but apparently they chatted and it was all forgotten. I'm glad since even though they don't go to the same school the girl has a cottage about 2 blocks from our summer place and watching my daughter afraid to walk around the area on the Thanksgiving weekend but wanting to keep out of it was a bit nerve racking.

Joan