Here at work, I am behind a rather restrictive proxy/firewall setup which prevents me from using IM clients like AIM, YIM, and ICQ (I actually use Trillian at home.) Well, being the chatty guy I am, I am looking for ways around this limitation. I can, through our telnet proxy, telnet into my Linux box at home. I found a program called Ari's Yahoo! client which is a command-line client for Yahoo Messenger that is pretty dodgy, but sometimes works. However I haven't found any solutions for the other IM clients, and this client's interface is less than ideal.

So, I've heard about something called Jabber, which supposedly unites several of the IM protocols, and allows you to connect with various clients. I don't have much knowledge of the details of it though, and I'm curious as to if anyone here uses Jabber, has any experience with any Jabber command-line clients, and can tell me if it's the right solution here. If there is some other all-in-one command-line IM program for Linux that I haven't seen, I'm all ears.

Thanks.