To block gmail chat, you simply configure your firewall/proxy to block requests to/from 209.85.201.189 which corresponds to http://chatenabled.mail.google.com
There is no such mechanism for igoogle.com chat. In fact, igoogle.com redirects to http://www.google.com/ig/ which meant that blocking igoogle.com as a domain would not do the trick. Users could still go directly to www.google.com/ig/ and access chat.
Today, I accidentally ran across a solution.
To successfully block the chat feature of igoogle.com you need to block access to the following URL.
I used special URL filtering software to block any requests sent to "talkgadget.google.com".
You can do the same using windows default HOSTS file by redirecting talkgadget.google.com to 127.0.0.1 or using a proxy that filters out this domain.
The result is access to igoogle.com and all other google features, but with chat disabled!
Please leave me comments. Let me know if this worked for you, or if you notice something that needs to be changed. Use the Tell&Share icon under the title of the post to share it with your friends or digg it!
