Inside Chat Spy

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET Staff on February 27, 2009

This program logs chat conversations from popular instant messenger programs, but we couldn't get the feature to e-mail log reports to work. Inside Chat Spy is simply laid out and easy to use, a saving grace when the help file wouldn't open.

Security is top notch; the application runs in stealth mode and is accessible only with a user-definable hot key and password. It doesn't appear in Add/Remove programs or in the Task Manager once minimized, and the program can only be removed using an option found on Inside Chat Spy's interface. The program covered the most popular IM programs, from Google Talk to Yahoo. Records were viewable on the UI and by e-mail, but the e-mail reports never arrived in our in-box. Logs record the time, user name, IM client, and recipient as well as the content of chats.

The program lacks scheduled monitoring, but you can indicate specific users and IM clients to record. There's an option to highlight user-specified keywords in conversations, but it pinpoints only one word at a time and only when viewing logs on the program's interface. Logged conversations appear in paragraph format, instead of by message as they do in most IM windows, which made them harder to follow. Though it has a few drawbacks, Inside Chat Spy is a capable IM monitoring application.