"Don't be evil", my arse!

when I use Google Talk it saves my entire chat history in my Google account; I can access it from the Gmail page.

is that not what you are looking for?

I want to *get it out of Google onto my own hard drive*.

This method is the ONLY one that worked.

Wasn't easy to get it to work even for me.

If you can't download your data and walk away with it, it's not yours!

If anyone still wants to google talk me, they can add [email protected]

While you can recover your entire Gmail store by connecting with IMAP and feeding it into a local mailbox, you can't do that to chat logs.

The hoops you have to jump to do that are arduous. Imagine that your Gmail account gets deleted. Happened to some people.

ah, I understand, thanks for clarifying