First, sorry to hear about your job. I hope things work out.

Regarding chat logs: If you have Message History enabled in MSN Messenger, it writes an XML file per contact with your conversations.

When it comes to the e-mailing thing, I have no concrete suggestion.

1. chat log to XML.
2. e-mail (from say, my thunderbird client) to XML.

If I had the money I’d pay someone to do it. That’s how much I want these. But, I just lost my job recently.

Interesting that you bring that up!

In my case, the text contained HTML as well, which they wanted removed.

So I ran a regular expression script to remove all tags first; basically, like this:
strNodeText = strNodeText.replace(/<\/?[^>]+(>|$)/g, “”);

However, if the text also contains tags that should be left there, this solution isn’t optimal. This script is only meant for plain text.