jabber.el is a Jabber client running under Emacs. For more information on the open-protocol instant messaging network Jabber, please visit http://www.jabber.org.
As a Jabber client, jabber.el is mostly just a face in the crowd, except that it uses buffers where GUI clients have windows. There is a roster buffer, and to chat with someone you open a chat buffer, and there are browse buffers (increasingly inexactly named) for interaction with servers and services. Then again, jabber.el delivers excellent console performance and customizable hooks (if you have speech synthesizer software, hook it up to your presence alerts).
Main unfeatures of jabber.el are SASL, SSL and TLS. Beyond that, there is nearly no support for advanced MUC features required for moderation and other things.