If theres a way to do this other than leavng zone, tell me.
Id like to see it so that you could maybe seperate the party chat from the regular zone garbage. Zone tends to flood/spam my little chat window so fast that I dont even see the comments my teammates are trying to say.

Little icon in the bottom right of the chat window, chat settings, create new tab, customize what channels show up in this new tab and enjoy your spam-free team chat.

do the following:

Right click on your chat tab (top of chat box)
Click on the copy button (at bottom) of new window that pops up.
Rename it to zone.
Go back to chat tab (left arrow key next to name input box in window)
untick zone in chat tab.
You now have a chat window with zone as a tab of it's own... and a tab for all your pvt/team/fleet chat.

So I'm almost a total rookie (newb?) and find this info very useful. I'd like to be more social and there was just too much info floating by in my chat window. Was finding myself "auto-grouped" on certain missons and couldn't even figure out how to say thanks to the other folks that helped out.