Gmail – How to connect to a Jabber chat room within Google Chat

Google recently announced support for rich text in signatures. That means you can now configure the font family, size and color, as well as insert images into the signature. Just go to your gmail settings and you'll find it right there, no need to enable as a lab feature or anything! It's possible it hasn't been expanded to Google Apps for your domain yet, in which case it should be coming pretty soon.

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If your school uses a private domain name (i.e., your email address does not end with @gmail.com) then the administrator controls access to any and all features of your account, including Google applications such as chat. There's nothing you can do then. Just switch to your own GMail account, or use an external app to chat.