I absolutely love Gaim, but the message to group feature isn't readily available, even with gaim2-beta3, and this doesn't work for me especially that I sometimes need to broadcast messages to team members over IM. Quick googling led me to Frank Spychalski's very good article , which covers the essentials of configuring Google Talk on Kopete. For Ubuntu users, if you don't have Kopete yet, you will need an internet connection to get the necessary packages. $ sudo apt-get install -y kopete qca-tls The qca-tls package will ensure that you'll be able to connect using the default encryption protocol. After these packages install, start Kopete, and create a new Jabber account if you don't have it yet. On the first tab, set up your Jabber ID to use your Gmail address: Jabber Id: <yourid>@gmail.com On the "Connection" tab, use talk.google.com as your server and tick all the boxes like so: [x] Use protocol encryption (SSL) [x] Allow plain-text passwor...