Access Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger, and other IM clients from within iChat

Apple's instant messaging client, iChat, is elegant and easy to use, and with OS X Leopard, Apple have added direct support for Google Talk. This makes it possible (with a little effort) to consolidate ALL of your instant messaging accounts (Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger, AIM, ICQ, etc.) into iChat.

Once you've integrated your accounts into iChat, you can then make use of it's enhanced integration with other Apple apps such as Mail and Address Book. For example, if Joe Bloggs sends you an email, Apple Mail will show you whether he's online or not, even though Joe is only available via his Yahoo Messenger account.

Another benefit of combining all your IM accounts into Google Talk is that the chat functionality in Gmail becomes cross-platform too. You can log into Gmail from anywhere and instantly access all your chat buddies in MSN Messenger, Yahoo, AIM, etc.

The basic steps are:

1. set up a Gmail Account (with Google Talk)
2. use Psi to add external Jabber transports for Yahoo and MSN messenger to the Gmail Account
3. configure iChat to access the Google Talk account
4. then map the addresses in iChat to items in the Address Book

I got this working over the weekend, based on several different online guides and my own research, but I thought it might be useful to put all the information in one place for anyone who might want to try this themselves.

Step 1
Firstly, you will need a Gmail account, if you've not got one already. Just go to the Gmail site and choose the "Sign up for Google Mail" link. Once you've chosen your google user name, this will be your Gmail address and also the login name for Google Talk. Make a note of your gmail address as you will use it later on to log into the Jabber service. Usually gmail addresses end @gmail.com, but in the UK and elsewhere it may end in @googlemail.com. Your gmail address is shown at the top right of the screen when you log in.

Step 2
Google Talk uses a protocol called Jabber, which is a protocol supported by iChat. Unfortunately iChat doesn't include all the Jabber functionality we need to set up additional IM services (called Transports). However, we can use another IM application called Psi, available free here, to configure Google Talk.

Once you've dowloaded and run PSI, go to the "General" menu and choose "Account Setup". Then add a new account with the following settings:

Name: Google Talk
Jabber ID: the same as your Gmail address from step 1
Password: the same as your Gmail password

Save the settings and close the account creation screen. The Google Talk login will now appear in the PSI window, but not logged on. Right-click on the Google Talk account in the list and choose Status > Online, this should log you into Google Talk.

A list of available contacts will appear, if this is your first time using Google Talk you'll probably just see your own name.

Step 3
Now we need to add the additional transports to Google for any other IM services we use. To do this, right click on the "Google Talk" account in Psi's main window and choose "Service Discovery".

Natively Google Talk only supports one service, Google Talk itself. But we can add transports from other Jabber servers, of which there are hundreds. I use jabber.freenet.de, but you can get a list of available open Jabber servers here.

Before you go on, go to Psi > Preferences, click on the Events tab and check "Auto-authorize contacts". This will save time later on, as otherwise all the contacts you already have on other IM services will individually require authorising by Psi.

In the address field of the Service Discovery dialog in Psi, type jabber.freenet.de and click "Browse", a list of the supported transports will appear, including MSN, ICQ, Yahoo, AIM etc. Choose a transport for which you have a chat account, right-click on it and choose "Register", and provide your user name and password for that service.

If you've given the right user name and password, Psi should add that service as a Transport, and populate the list with all your contacts from that service. The names might look a little ugly at the moment as Jabber uses a special format to uniquely identify the user and the transport that it users. So a user called "somebody" using hotmail as their MSN messenger account ID might appear as somebody%hotmail.com@msn.jabber.freenet.de, a bit of a mouthful! Luckily we can fix this in iChat later on.

Do the same thing with your other IM clients. I've tried this with MSN messenger and Yahoo messenger accounts, but it should work with any transports that have Jabber transports.

Step 4
You can now if you wish use Psi as your chat client, but only reason we downloaded it was to use it's Service Discovery function. Quit Psi and fire up iChat.

In the preferences for iChat, go to Accounts and click the plus button to add a new account. If you're using OSX Leopard, simply choose "Google Talk Account" and provide your Google Account name (your Gmail address) and password. If you're using Tiger, you can still access Google Talk using iChat's Jabber protocol, using these instructions from Google.

Once you've added your Google account, you should see exactly the same contacts list as you saw in PSI, complete with the dodgy-looking buddy names. To make these into "friendly" names, choose a name from the list and click on "Show Info" in the Buddies menu. If that contact has an entry in your Address Book, you can link to their address book card from here. Their Jabber address will be added to their other details on their address book. You'll also be able to see their online status in Mail when they email you.

If you don't have an address book entry for that person, you can either create one now or simply type in the name of the person in the fields provided. iChat will then display this name rather than the one Jabber provides.

That's it!

Becky
AIM/iChat: theinactivist
YIM: beckyenverite