CoyIM

Ensuring your privacy is unquestionable while communicating with other people could be a painstaking endeavor, and it is mostly seasoned users that are actually doing something in this regard, while all the others imagine they need to go to great lengths in order to protect their sensitive data.

Nevertheless, there are applications that would cater to the needs of less skilled users as well, and proof of that is CoyIM, a chat client that requires no configuration in exchange for your security.

Before anything else, it is worth mentioning that Tor is a prerequisite, so you need to download and install it before running CoyIM since it is a guarantee of your anonymity. On the other hand, CoyIM requires no setup whatsoever, and its default settings should be safe enough at least for regular users.

It should also be pointed out that the chat protocol the program supports is Jabber, and the TLS certificates it employs should make sure your connection is easily verified. At the same time, end-to-end encryption is a given, thanks to the chat client’s built-in support for OTR.

As for the app’s looks, they are all about straightforwardness. In the main window, you can see your contacts, and the chat window itself is pretty minimalist as well, so you should not expect support for file transfer, profile customizations, or other embellishments such as emoticons.

But as mentioned previously, its focus lies elsewhere, namely in the secure environment it tries to offer. As such, you can verify your connections using fingerprints, and in case you want to save your configuration settings, you can store them in an encrypted file.

To be more specific as to the customizations you have access to, you can specify when you receive notifications as well as come up with a custom command that would run when you receive a new message. Aside from that, some general tweaks can be made to how conversations or empty groups are displayed.

But if you have already taken care of all some of these aspects, including your OTR fingerprints and keys, importing your settings should be a breeze, regardless of whether you have been previously using Pidgin, Gajim, Adium, or other chat clients.

All things considered, CoyIM is a security-oriented chat client whose main concern is to offer unbreakable protection against data leaks as is. The program comes with various essential tools to make sure your identity is not exposed, and considering that it is still under heavy development, its future sounds promising.