There’s a new boy on the multi messenger scene and his name is Digsby (OK maybe her name).

Digsby is not just a cool multi messenger program but it is also a brilliant email checker for both web based email accounts and the traditional POP/IMAP accounts. And on top of that Digsby also lets you keep track of your accounts on the big four social networking sites in real time.

Go to the Digsby site

As I have friends on different messengers and offer support for my guestbook script I have to be available on all messenger networks. By all I mean Yahoo, WLM (formerly MSN), ICQ, AIM and more recently Gtalk. So for years I used Trillian to let me connect to all these networks from a single program. But earlier this year I discovered Digsby. Digsby is a relatively new program so isn’t as polished as the likes of Trillian but I prefer it over Trillian for a couple of reasons. The main reason being that Digsby can check your email for you even if you use Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL, GMail or a standard POP or Imap account. When you get a new email you can delete it, mark it as read, report it as spam etc all from within Digsby.

Digsby also lets you keep track of your account of social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and Twitter as well as updating them from within Digsby. Digsby also supports Facebook chat so you can chat with your friends when they are using Facebook.

One brilliant feature of Digsby is the ability to place a Flash widget on your profile or any web page you wish and people can then chat to you via the widget.

Here is the Digsby widget in action.

As I said previously Digsby is still in it’s infancy so still needs polishing in some areas but the developers are always working on it, fixing bugs, adding new features and polishing existing features, Also, like Trillian Astra, Digsby stores all your details in a central database so you don’t have to remember all your settings and passwords if you use Digsby on a different computer.

Just remember to decline on all of the excess crap that the Digsby installer offers.

There is an annoying bug/oversight in Googles Gmail that is starting to get on my tits. It does not honour the reply-to header in emails. Bascially an email has a From header which shows which address it has been sent from and this would usually be where the email is sent to when you hit reply. But you can also include a header called reply-to which the receivers email client should use when the reply button/link is clicked. My forum script, SMF, uses this method so that emails sent via the forum all come from my email address and the email address of the sender is put in to the reply-to header so if you hit reply it will send the email to them. Why Gmail does not support this I don’t know and I informed them about it about 2 months ago now if not longer.