BeAIM - Instant Messaging in Zeta

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BeAIM is based on AOL's popular Instant Messenger (AIM), and therefore lets you chat with any of AIM's about 150 million registered users. For more information, please visit: http://www.aim.com/

BeAIM - Instant Messaging in Zeta

With BeAIM you can chat with other people on the Internet in real time. There are instant-messaging services available from many different companies.

#### How to sign up

To use BeAIM you will need an user account with the AOL instant-messaging service. Fortunately, these accounts are free. An account can be open at http://www.aim.com/. You need to come up with a user name and a password. Finding a user name can be quite difficult, as lots of people have registered before you. So be creative, and concider mixing numbers and letters.

#### Starting BeAIM

Once you have registered a user name, you can start BeAIM. In the dialog box that appears, enter your user name and password. The login procedure can be done automatically, if you enable Save Password and Login Automatically.

As you press Login, BeAIM connects to the AIM network. The AIM network directs chat traffic between all BeAIM and AIM client connected to the Internet. As long as you are logged in to the network, BeAIM will constantly checking if any of your buddies are online, what their status are, and if they are sending you any messages. In the same way BeAIM will broadcast this information about you.

#### The Interface

BeAIM's interface is easy to understand, as there are no unneccessary buttons, no banner advertisements or scrolling stock tickers. It's just an application with the basic features you need for chatting!
The Buddy list

The buddy list is BeAIM's main window, and stores all your online contacts (friends, relatives and colleagues). It's from the main window you initiate chat sessions.

<screenshot main window>

If you are a new BeAIM user, and never used AIM before in Windows, Linux or MacOS, your buddy list will be empty. To communicate with someone, the other person will have to have an AIM account as well. You must know their nickname / screen name, to be able to add them to your buddy list. You can add as many people, as you want to the list, although you may want to keep your list short to make your instant-messaging communication easier to manage.

To start adding buddies, you first have to add a group to store them in:

If you know the person's nick (buddy name), you can add it directly and place him in one of your defined groups:

If you for some reason don't know the person's nick (buddy name), you can do a search by e-mail address:

If you have used BeAIM before, you might find that you've already got buddies in the list that appears. That is because BeAIM stores your buddies. It can happen that you for one reason or another loose the list, you can than import it:

If you have been using GAIM under Linux or Windows, you can import the GAIM Buddylist. In Windows the path is: C:\Documents and Settings\frankps\Application Data\.gaim\blist.

####
Blocking Users

You may want to prevent some one from seeing that you are online, so that they can initialize a chat with you. Hopefully the person only chats to frequently with you, but it could also be that this person is hassling you electronically.

This feature is also useful if you simply need to get some work done for a while without being interrupted by casual chats.

The result of adding a user (buddy) to you Blocked Users list, is that they will see your name as being offline in their Buddy List. They will not know that you have blocked them, and you can at any given time unblock them by choosing them in the Blocked Users list and press the Remove button.

When you block a user, the following alert will appear on your screen:

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