Protecting Your Privacy
| Overview | Making Yourself Invisible | Changing Your Stealth Setting | Ignoring a Contact | Showing or Hiding Updates |
Changing Your Stealth Setting
Changing your stealth setting allows you to appear online to some contacts and offline to others. You can activate a stealth setting for an entire group or for an individual contact.
Note: This feature isn’t available with Pingbox™ visitors. 
Here’s How
In your Messenger List, select one or more contacts, right-click, then select Stealth Settings > Setting Option from the displayed menu.
Choose one of the following options:
Appear Online: Contacts see you as available (the default setting).
Appear Permanently Offline: Contacts see you as unavailable from one Messenger session to another until you change this setting.
Even though you appear unavailable to some contacts, they can send you instant messages. It’s up to you if you want to respond to them.
When you select Permanently Offline, the names in your Messenger List appear in italics to remind you that your friends think you’re unavailable.
What’s Next
If you really want to stop all communication from a contact, you can ignore the contact.
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.
- Messenger List: the main part of the Contact List in 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.
- Stealth setting: a setting that allows you to choose when specific contacts see you as online or offline.