Messenger Detect

Messenger Detect is, in essence, a keylogger that monitors chat software on your local area network and records it secretly into logs that can be viewed, exported or sent via email.

Considering its purpose, Messenger Detect may seem a little inappropriate, but as it turns out, fans make quite the crowd, as in the case of any other keylogger.

Although spying on employees and family members is not compliant with the definition of morality, there are border line situations that require such a tool.

Messenger Detect is a qualified candidate, although unlike most keyloggers, it concentrates only on chat sessions rather than the whole computer activity. It can record continuously chats from Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, AOL, ICQ, Google Talk and several others.

The recording process is carried out by a hidden service, thus removing all suspicions that the computer is being monitored in any way. Also, the service is set to start at system boot, so you don’t have to run it manually each time.

Moreover, Messenger Detect has been built for multi-user systems, thus it can monitor and record chats for all the Windows users detected on the computer it runs on.

If, for some reason, you want to skip recording chats from a certain IP address, you can set the application to ignore it. Consequently, if you’re using a proxy server, you should specify it under its Options window, so that it’s taken into consideration.

Recorded logs are categorized by date, IP address and chat type and can be uploaded to a FTP server, attached to an email or simply exported to HTML or text format for later use.

Absolutely everything is password protected, including access to the application or to its settings and logs. The password is set from the first use, but can be changed from inside the program.

All of the above suggest that Messenger Detect makes a decent spy, but it’s too bad that chat sessions are its only target. A real keylogger provides extensive monitoring options for the whole computer activity, not for parts of it.