I preferred the error message. Nothing left hanging. I haven't yet had a situation where a line I type now is something I still want said an hour or ten later. We have e-mail for that. When somebody missed something, copy & paste is just fine. Several times in iChat 3 I have even deliberately sent myself a ‘silent' last IM after a person signed off, to save it in my chat file for my own information.

As an AIM user for over 9 years now, I use instant messaging only like it says: for immediate communication. I would want delayed delivery only if I could choose it case-by-case. (In case anyone at Apple is listening.)

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That's a really good idea to have it optional. Jotting down notes in the message window after a person logs off is a smart way to keep track of conversation followups when you regularly refer to chat logs. Or even better would be to integrate a "notes" option within the chat that gets written to the log but doesn't get sent to the other participants, so that you can keep notes following a chat even if they don't log off.

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