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 instant message conversations. The archives reside on your personal computer, and only you—signed in with your Yahoo! ID—can access and view the archived messages.
Notes: The one exception is a public computer. If you’re working
on a public computer, you might not want to archive your instant
messages, as anyone who has access to that computer will have access
to those messages.
Messenger doesn’t archive instant messages between you
and Pingbox™ visitors.
How Archiving Works
You choose whether or not to archive by enabling or disabling the archive feature. After you enable the feature (it’s enabled by default), Yahoo! Messenger creates a folder for each contact that you instant message and begins archiving your instant messages. This archive is identified by the date of the conversation and both your ID and the contact’s ID. Each time you converse with a particular contact on the same date, Messenger adds the message to the same archive along with a timestamp. If you instant message the same contact on a different day, Messenger begins a new archive in the same folder.
What’s Next
By default, Messenger archives your instant messages, and then clears the archive when you sign out. The next task shows you how to change this behavior.
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, instant message, or text message.
- 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.
- Yahoo! ID: the name by which a person is known to the Yahoo! network.