How to Disable Gmail Chat Without Disable Gmail for a Network

Published by: Alex George on June 26, 2009
Nowadays it is not uncommon employees spend precious office time for fun by using Social Media sites and online chats. In order to use office time productive, it is necessary to prevent office computers from accessing popular chat programs and social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. However, Gmail is very necessary but it has a built-in chat feature. If you are a small company owner or network administrator wants to disable Gmail chat(Google Hangouts) in your office without stopping employees from accessing Gmail, this tutorial is for you.


  1. Disable Google Chat From Complete Network Using DNS Lookup Table

    This step prevents office computers from opening Google Hangouts even though they can access Gmail. If router or firewall in your office has the feature DNS lookup table controlling, you can disable this feature. It is done by assigning the Gmail chat DNS to the loopback address.

    In technical words here we assign chatenabled.mail.google.com to 127.0.0.1 and the Gmail Hangout function will be disabled for the complete network. Plus point of this step is, we can still access Gmail on office computers.

    Explanation
    • Gmail chat DNS = chatenabled.mail.google.com

    • Loopback address = 127.0.0.1

  2. Block gtalk in a Local Network By Third Party Tools

    There are so many free and paid software products available in the market to disable Google Hangouts in a network. As a network administrator, these products offer tension free blocking of it without worrying about the attempts of office users to bypass firewall restrictions.

  3. Disable chat in Your Gmail Account

    In order to disable this feature on your Gmail account follow the steps below.

    1. Log in to your Gmail account.

    2. Click on the status as shown in the image below
      Disable chat feature from your gmail account

    3. Click on the option "sign out of chat"
      Sign out of gamil chat option

    This step cannot disable Google Hangouts for a network but it can just disable this feature in the specific account. So this step cannot help an administrator to block this feature for users in the network without their permission.

The methods explained above can stop office staffs from using Google Chat on their computers. However, there are always solutions to bypass the office restrictions to use it. CoreNetworkZ.com has many tutorials explaining popular methods to bypass the company firewall restrictions to use Facebook, Twitter, Google Hangouts etc. However, I do not think it is wise to combine those articles with an article which helps the network administrator to block online chat products.

Other Tutorials
  1. How to Check Online Status Of Your Yahoo Messenger Contact

  2. Google Talk Invisibility Checker

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5 comments:

  1. Anonymous4:59 PM

    AWWWWWWWWWWW YEAAAAAAA
    Thanks MAn!
    Edward

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'm working in a s/w industry. In my company all sorts of chatting is disabled. By using IE, i'm not able to use chat in gmail. But by using mozilla, i am able to use the chat facility. How is it possible?

    ReplyDelete
  3. It might be because of the fault of corporate Firewall they are using to block chat function. Without knowing the exact network layout we cannot explain this.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anonymous9:52 AM

    it's not working in my computers.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Anonymous8:10 AM

    iam using Netgear prosafe vpn firewall route how to block chat function in our network computers

    ReplyDelete

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