> AOL took issue with most third-party clients - I and a number of other users would periodically get permanently banned from AIM, apparently for the sole crime of using a third-party client they could notice. My friends got used to every 6-12 months seeing that I was messaging them from a new name.
Weird, I used Trillian on Windows and Adium on Mac exclusively for years, from 2004 through some time in the mid 2010s when all of my old AIM and ICQ contacts had moved on to Steam and then later Discord. Never had any issues other than the usual stuff where file transfers and the like weren't reliable with third party clients.
My impression was that something about naim in particular triggered their wrath, since as you say, Gaim and Trillian rarely provoked ire. But their support was unhelpful, and it happened a couple times to more people than just one user at once, so _something_ about it was clearly rustling their jimmies.
They did eventually seem to back off though, as the sibling commenter said, because after a certain point I stopped randomly getting banned ever again from then until the end of AIM as a service.
Weird, I used Trillian on Windows and Adium on Mac exclusively for years, from 2004 through some time in the mid 2010s when all of my old AIM and ICQ contacts had moved on to Steam and then later Discord. Never had any issues other than the usual stuff where file transfers and the like weren't reliable with third party clients.