Protecting Your Privacy

Overview Making Yourself Invisible Changing Your Stealth Setting Ignoring a Contact

Overview

Yahoo! Messenger strives to provide an environment in which you feel safe, while letting you enjoy easy access to your contacts. Messenger offers a number of ways to avoid interactions with people you don’t wish to communicate with while using the Messenger features, including:

  • Invisibility—Shows you as unavailable to every contact who has your name on their Messenger List. You can decide to be invisible when you sign in, or set the invisible state while using Messenger.

  • Stealth setting—Lets you to appear online to some people and offline to others. You can activate a stealth setting for an entire group or for individuals. Not available with Facebook friends or Pingbox™ visitors. Learn more

  • Ignore—Shows you as unavailable to specified contacts and stops all communication from them. These contacts can initiate communication from their computers, but you won’t see or hear any attempts to contact you. This is the right choice to make when you really don’t want to interact with someone. To use this feature, the contact’s name can’t be on your Messenger List. You can ignore contacts on your Ignore List or anyone who isn’t on your Messenger List. Not available with Facebook friends or Pingbox visitors. Learn more

 

What’s Next

You can change your status to offline for all contacts who have your name on their Messenger Lists by signing in as invisible.

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Words to Know

  • Contact: a person with whom you interact; someone to whom you might want to send an email, instant message, or text message.
  • Group: one or more contacts that you organise together under one unique name, similar to an email list. By default, Yahoo! Messenger adds contacts to the "Friends" group included in the application.
  • Messenger List: the main part of the Contact List in AT&T Yahoo! Messenger. The Messenger List includes the contacts with whom you communicate most often.
  • Pingbox: an embedded box on a Web page where visitors to the page can send you instant messages and which lists visitors on your Messenger List.

Popups

To ignore or hide from your Facebook friends while using Messenger, you need to sign out of Facebook. The Chatting With Facebook Friends in Yahoo! Messenger video tutorial shows you how.If you want to ignore or hide from Pingbox visitors, you can either turn the Pingbox off or remove it. To learn more, take a look at the Chatting With Visitors to Your Personal Web Page tutorial.