What is Instant Messaging (IM)? IM is a way for you to communicate instantly with your friends over the Internet. That might not sound so different to email. Have you ever noticed how cumbersome it is to have a brief conversation via email? You have to click Reply to each message, then find the right spot in the message to type something new, then send it. Then you have to wait for the next message to arrive! IM lets you to have a conversation almost as naturally as on the phone or face to face, by typing messages into a window shared between you and your friend's screens.

Another difference between IM and email is that with IM you can see your friends' presence, that is, whether they are actually on-line at the same time as you. This lets you send messages truly instantly, instead of sending off a mail and having to wait for your friend to check their mailbox. An IM message pops up on the other person's screen as soon as you send it. Of course, if you'd rather not be interrupted, you can change your own presence so others will know not to disturb you.

There are lots of other fun and useful IM features you can explore with Kopete, like group chats, file transfers and emoticons that reflect your mood. Read on to find out more!

Now you'll notice that an icon representing the account has appeared in the status bar at the bottom of the Kopete Contact List window. This represents your current presence for this account. Right click on it and you can go online from the menu that appears. The status bar icon will animate while Kopete connects to the IM service.

Once you're online, if you've used this IM service before, your contacts will be fetched from the server and displayed in the Contact List. To start a chat with a contact, just click their name and a Chat window will appear. The upper part of the window is where the conversation appears - to say something, type into the bottom part of the window and click Send.

If you've just created a new account you won't have any contacts. See Adding Contacts for details on how to add contacts.

We briefly showed you how to add an account in Getting Started. To change an account's setting later...

Behaviour and Notifications covers the way Kopete integrates with your desktop, “Away” settings, and chat user interface options.

Appearance governs the style of the Chat window, its colours and fonts, and lets you choose your preferred emoticons.

You can customise Kopete with special functions that may be useful or just a bit of fun.

Connection Status is useful for modem users or others who don't have a permanent Internet connection. It watches for an active Internet connection and sets your accounts online when it detects you have dialed up.

Contact Notes allows you to note down any useful bits of information on a metacontact.

Cryptography lets you use GPG to encrypt conversations. Note that this is not the same as an SSL secured chat session - this kind of encryption not only ensures the message cannot be tampered with, it also guarantees that only the intended recipient can read the messages.

Highlight works a little like e-mail filters, in that it allows you to make things happen in response to particular messages. As well as highlighting the text, you can play sounds.

The History plugin, when activated, records conversations using any IM system and allows you to view old conversations later. A History item appears in each Metacontact's context menu, to view the message history for that metacontact.

In conjunction with a webcam and the Video4Linux package, this lets you detect when you're no longer at your computer and have Kopete automatically become “Away”.

With the Now Listening plugin, let people you're chatting with know what you're listening to, by typing /media in a chat, or from the File+Actions menu.

Text Effect applies funny effects to your messages before sending them, like colouring them or changing the case of the words. Just don't forget you have activated it - we've had bug reports from forgetful Text Effect users!

The Translator plugin lets you define a preferred language for each Metacontact, and then translates messages to or from them using web based translation services such as Google™ and Babelfish™.

Web Presence allows you to publicise your IM presence on the Web. Give it the path to a file on an FTP server, (for example), and it will upload a short piece of HTML to that file, which you can include in your homepage. Good for bloggers to make friends with, or you could use it to use IM in your business.