Your chat availability appears at the top of the page, next to your ID. You’ll see Offline next to a sleeping gray face if you haven’t signed into chat yet. Click Offline (or whatever you see there next to your ID) to open a pull-down menu where you can select a different availability.

Your chat availability remains the same over multiple Yahoo! Mail sessions until you make a change to it – so if you choose Available you’ll continue to pop up as Available to others the next time you sign in.

Anytime you’re signed out of Mail, you are also signed out of chat.

These are the basic availability choices:

Available – Other Yahoo! contacts see you as Online/Available for Chat.

Busy – This indicates you’re online, but that you don’t want to be disturbed.

Invisible – You’re online, but you’d rather not let anybody know. You look offline to everyone but you can still start a chat if you want.

Sign out of Chat – When you sign out, people see the same thing they see when you’re “Invisible”: your face-icon is gray and sleeping.

Write your own status

You can also write your own status message after either Available or Busy. For example, you could select Busy and write “crunch time!”

Here’s how to add your own status:

1. Click your current status at the top of the page. It’s next to your ID. This opens a pull-down menu.
2. Select Custom Status Message.*
3. After “Appear as”, select Available or Busy.
4. In the box after “Your Message”, add the text you want.
5. Click OK. Done!

*Not seeing Custom Status Message in the pull-down menu? Activate chat first – set your status to Available. Then start at step 1.

Note: Custom status messages only last as long as you’re logged into Mail. Whatever you write will be gone the next time you sign in.

Yahoo! Messenger desktop application users: If we detect that you’re already signed into Messenger, we'll just quietly not sign you into chat – we don't want to interrupt what you’re already doing. Of course, you can always change your status from the menu. Signing into chat will sign you out of Messenger.