This has been working well for me for approximately 8 years or so:

http://boykin.acis.ufl.edu/~boykin/2005/projects/directory_policy/policy.html

The main benefit of organizing by year is that once the year is gone, you know that directory will never be written to again, so backing up becomes so easy, I actually very regularly do it. A little rsync, a few computers, and periodic DVD burning means I haven't lost any data in a long time.

Yes. I am using Gaim in Debian and specifically I get this reponse from talk.google.com:

<error code="405" type="cancel"><not-allowed xmlns="urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:xmpp-stanzas"/><text xmlns="urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:xmpp-stanzas">Server does not support PLAIN</text></error>

The strange thing is, Gaim is not sending plain text to the server. It is using digest authentication with all the other jabber servers I talk to.

Finally, I am certainly using TLS, as I have verified by looking in the Gaim debug window as well as using ethereal to look at the stream and see the starttls turn on the encryption.