How to use

[David Woolley]

Cynthia wrote:
> I have set up a Pidgen account thru Hotmail.  I could not figure out how 

You can't setup a Pidgin account through a service, although you can 
sometimes set up a service account through Pidgin and you can configure 
Pidgin to use a service account.  As far as I know, Hotmail is an email 
service, not an instant messaging service, although MSN and Micosoft's 
"Live" branded IM services share a common owner.

> to do this with Outlook Express which is my main  email account.  My 
> question is do I have to be open in my Hotmail account to get instant 
> messages from my contact I set up who uses Yahoo?  What if I browsing on 
> line and not signed into Hotmail? Thank you, Cindy

As a general principle, you need to be signed into the same services as 
the buddies with whom you want to communicate.  There isn't a Hotmail 
service, but someone with a Hotmail address is likely to have an account 
with the MSN service.

I believe there is a special exception for MSN and Yahoo, which does 
allow messages submitted through one service to be be sent to a user of 
the other, although I haven't used it myself.  I seem to remember that 
you have to use a special prefix on Yahoo addresses.  Generally what you 
should be able to do with Pidgin is what you can do with the official 
clients (e.g. MSN Messenger), so the official Microsoft documentation 
should help explain what you can do.  There may be subtle differences in 
the way that addresses are entered.

Another complication is that MSN user names are not really email 
addresses, and, at least in Europe, you can sign up with an address that 
is not valid for email.  They are also not restricted to being Microsoft 
issued addresses; my office email address is an MSN address.  Unless 
there is a specific block on Yahoo addresses, someone could sign up to 
MSN using a Yahoo email address and then use the MSN service, rather 
than, or as well as, the Yahoo one.

Outlook Express is not tied to a particular email address issuer, so, if 
Yahoo offer a POP (or if OE supports it, IMAP) email service, which they 
may well do, you could use Outlook Express to access Yahoo mailboxes.

-- 
David Woolley
Emails are not formal business letters, whatever businesses may want.
RFC1855 says there should be an address here, but, in a world of spam,
that is no longer good advice, as archive address hiding may not work.