In this part of our Yahoo!^® Messenger tutorial we will show you how to contact and chat to the friends you have added in your messenger friends list.

Before you follow this tutorial you must read the terms of our disclaimer.

In part three:
Checking your friend is online. Making contact with your friend. Continue to Part 4 Back to course menu.

Checking if your friend is online

After adding a friend you will see their Yahoo!^® ID and a small icon (face) appear in the main messenger window (see fig 1.1 below).

If your friend is offline (not connected or hasn't given permission yet for you to add them to your list) then the Yahoo!^® ID and small face icon will be similar to that in fig 1.1.

If your friend is online and they have accepted you as a friend then the small face icon and name will appear like helpwithpcs_friend in our example below (fig 1.2).

In other words when your friend is online and available the face will be brighter and smiling and the Yahoo!^® ID will be in bold letters.

Also notice your status (pointed out in fig 1.1), by default (unless changed) it is set to I'm Available, this means that if you are on someone else's friends list then they can see you are online and contact you if they wish.

Your status can be changed to Unavailable by clicking on the small arrow next to your status, this would make it appear that you are offline but you can still receive messages.

Making contact with your friend

To initiate contact with your friend is very straight forward, after checking they are online simply double click on their Yahoo!^® ID in your friends list, this will open the instant message box similar to that shown in fig 1.3 below:

As you can see in fig 1.3 we have entered the message Hello in the message box, to send your message either press the Enter key or click on the send button, we have also pointed out where the messages will appear.

In fig 1.4 above you can see our message has been sent and our friend has replied, all the messages you send between you and your friend are private and you can chat for as long as you want.

There is a conferencing feature with Yahoo!^® Messenger which allows multiple people to chat in the same message box, we will cover this as well as voice conferencing and viewing web cams in upcoming tutorials.