Working With the Contact List
| What Is... | Controlling What the List Displays | What Do Those Symbols Mean? | Changing the List’s Font and Text Color | Using Contact Cards |
What Is the Contact List?
The Contact List is your list of contacts in Yahoo! Messenger and has two parts: The Messenger List and the Address Book group.
The Messenger List is the main part of the Contact List and includes the contacts with whom you instant message. All you have to do is add contacts to your Messenger List, and start sending messages. We offer a variety of ways to do this.
Ask people if you can add their name to your Messenger List. This can be anyone with a Yahoo! ID or a Windows Live™ Messenger ID who uses a compatible instant messaging application. See the Adding Contacts to Your Messenger List tutorial to learn more.
Invite people to use Yahoo! Messenger. The invitation (an email message) shows them how to get a Yahoo! ID and how to install Yahoo! Messenger on their computer. To learn more, take a look at the Inviting Friends to Use Messenger tutorial.
Share your Messenger List with others, and they just might share theirs with you. What better way to populate your Messenger List than by sharing lists with your friends? The Sharing Messenger Lists tutorial shows you how.
The Messenger List is organized into groups—the Friends group supplied
by Yahoo!, groups that you create, the Facebook Friends group
if you’ve linked your Yahoo! account to your Facebook account,
and Pingbox™ groups if
you’ve added Pingboxes to
personal Web pages 
. Use groups to manage
your contacts in a way that works best for you.
When you’re ready to instant message your friend or initiate another type of communication, you can use the Contact Action Bar above the list as a quick way to find the name you want.
The Address Book group includes all of the contacts from your Yahoo! address book that are not listed in your Messenger List. Unlike Messenger List groups, which can share the same contact, the Address Book group cannot include contacts that are part of a Messenger List group.
What’s Next
You can change the way your list displays your contacts.
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 organize together under one unique name, similar to an email list. By default, Yahoo! Messenger adds contacts to the "Friends" group included in the application.
- 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.
- Pingbox group: a unique Messenger List group that lists visitors to the Web page to which you added a Pingbox.