1. Keep your status message up to date
2. Use a multi-protocol client
3. Declare IM “office hours”
4.  Trim the troublemakers
5. Move things to other media
   

2.  Washington Madam May Distribute Phone Records, Judge Rules
 
3.  2nd Circuit Upholds Student's Suspension for Instant-Messaging Violent Image 

4.  The End of Email: 

Like others, in the past week I've noticed a major uptick in the spam I receive on longstanding email addresses. It's gotten to the point where I've configured Gmail to scoop up the mail from those boxes so it can do its own junk mail sorting, and then I POP the mail into my Eudora client from Gmail. It's taken me from downloading email where more than 9 out of 10 are spam to fewer than 1 out of 10 as spam -- with the spam sitting harmlessly on Gmail.

But this is a good time to point out something beyond the cat-and-mouse of spam-and-filter: email is dying.

Email is the last great "shared hallucination" applications of the Internet. The Internet itself is a shared hallucination -- built to allow the routing of packets without any particular central coordination or backbone -- and first uses to which it was put are similarly able for anyone to step up to the plate and join. Internet Relay Chat can be done with anyone setting up a chat server; Usenet newsgroups -- what we know today as message boards and what dimly live on within Google Groups -- could be created by anyone, and their propagation would depend on the individual decision of each newsgroup server operator on whether to subscribe to it.

5.  Spamhaus:  I finally experienced first hand the scourge of Spamhaus over this past week.  I was staying at the Westin St. Francis in San Francisco for a conference and using the wireless connection there.  Someone complained that they hadn't received the email which I said I sent.  It turns out the recipient's spam detection software had blocked it - based on a point system which it used, my email went over the limit.  It turns out, a relay was listed in Spamhaus's blocked list:

2.3 RCVD_IN_XBL            RBL: Received via a relay in Spamhaus XBL

                            [12.149.141.243 listed in sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org]