Working With the Archives
| What Is Archiving? | Setting Your Archiving Preferences | Viewing Your Archives | Managing Your Archives |
What Is Archiving?
The Yahoo! Messenger archive feature provides a way to save a history of all of your IM conversations. The archives reside on your PC, not on the server, and only you—signed in with your Yahoo! ID—can access and view the archived messages. No other user can access or view your archives.
Tip: The one exception is a public server. If you’re working on a public server, you might not want to archive your IM conversations, as anyone who has access to that server will have access to those IM conversations.
How Archiving Works
You choose whether or not to archive by enabling or disabling the archive feature. After you enable the feature, Yahoo! Messenger creates a folder for each contact that you instant message and begins archiving your IM conversations. This archive is identified by the date of the conversation and both your Yahoo! ID and the contact’s Messenger ID. Each time you converse with a particular contact on the same date, Yahoo! Messenger adds the conversation to the same archive along with a timestamp for each message. If you converse with the same contact on a different day, Yahoo! Messenger begins a new archive in the same folder.
What’s Next
The first step in using the archive feature is to enable it.
Words to Know
- Archive: a place to save a history of all of your instant messages, alerts, conferences, and text messages.
- Contact: a person with whom you interact; someone to whom you might want to send an email or instant message.
- Conversation: an exchange of instant messages between you and a contact.
- IM: the acronym for instant message.
- Instant messaging: the ability to exchange messages in real time with other people over the Internet.
- Yahoo! ID: the name by which a person is known to all Yahoo! networks.