I'd like to be able to get all my Google chat logs so that I can use them for training a chat bot type of thing.
I am aware of the limitations that have been imposed by Google so that chats cannot be simply downloaded through IMAP. I'm looking for workarounds.
It is not possible to download the Google chat logs unless they are attached to an email conversation. See, for example, the Wikipedia entry on Google Talk and the two references therein.
It's not possible to download the chat logs unless they're attached to an email conversation - maybe you could fwd all of the logs that are held in your 'chats' folder and then download the conversations over IMAP or POP?
Take a wander through the Google Talk API. And this may, or may not, help too: GMailAPI
If you know how to download a email. You can do the same to chat. Because chats are nothing but an email tagged with label chat. If you see chats, they are actually sent from the person you chatted with to you.
If you're looking to make a program to do this, you could use a greasemonkey script and a local PHP server.
The greasemonkey script would pick up chats as you visit them, parse them, and send them to the local PHP server, which could then dump it to a TXT, SQL, whatever.
Contact me if you want some help, I might be interested in this, though I'll be on holidays the next months :)