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 then appears, enter your user name and password.

The buddy list
The buddy list stores all your online contacts (friends, relatives
and colleagues).

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. You might for one reason or another loose the list,
you can than import it:

Let the chat begin!
A chat can start in two ways: By you or by somebody that wants
to chat with you.

You can contact someone for a chat, or just double-click on their
account name, and then type your first message.
If you want to chat with somebody currently not in your list, go
to People and choose Contact User... . Type in the account name
and click OK.
BeAIM displays all messages sent and received, and lets you in that
way keep track of your conversation with the other person. There
may be a small delay from the time you sent a message until it appears
on the other person's display.
While you communicate with another person, BeAIM will display their
screen name. It is possible to participate in multiple conversations
at once.
Setting your status
As more and more people are getting broadband connections at home,
people are letting their computer be online, even if they are not
sitting in front of the computer or are busy working with something.
You can then change your status from Available to Away, by going
to Away and unmarking Available. You can your Custom Away Message...
or you can have several different Away Messages... .

The BeAIM replicant in the Deskbar
The BeAIM replicant lets you Quit the application or Logout from
the AIM network. From this replicant you can also edit the application's
preferences or edit your profile.
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