Most companies are just beginning to wake up to the popularity of IM in the workplace. While more than a third of employees use instant-messaging services at work, only 31% of organizations have policies in place that specifically restrict the use of IM, according to a survey on workplace monitoring by the American Management Association and the ePolicy Institute. But the issue has caught the attention of leading industries. The National Association of Securities Dealers requires member firms to "supervise" the use of instant messaging the same way they do written and electronic communications and to retain electronic copies of instant messages for at least three years.

The survey found that only 13% of companies have started logging IM records, but the crackdown is starting to take effect: About 2% of employers have fired employees for something they said over IM. By comparison, the study said, 26% of companies have terminated employees for misuse of email.

There are several ways users can save IM sessions. Google Inc.'s Google Talk instant-messaging service automatically saves the chat sessions of users that have signed in with Gmail email accounts. Users of Google Talk can disable the setting or choose to go "off the record" during a particular session if they want to avoid having it saved. Other instant-messaging services, such as AOL's AIM, Yahoo Inc.'s Yahoo Messenger, and Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Live Messenger, don't store conversations on their servers automatically. But they do offer various tools for companies and individuals to log conversations. Users can save an IM session by using a built-in save feature or by copying it into another file.