Communication and Message Transfer Protocols

Instant Messaging server-to-server and client-to-server communications occur over TCP/IP.

Instant Messaging uses SMTP to send messages to offline users.

Browsers use HTTP to retrieve Instant Messenger resource files from the Web server. Once retrieved, the browser reads the HTML and displays the contents of the files.

Instant Messaging 7 is an XMPP/Jabber client/server solution, able to communicate with XMPP-compliant servers, clients, and gateways. Gateways are available in the open-source community to enable communication between Jabber and AOL, Yahoo, and other instant messaging systems.