Yahoo! Messenger

Yahoo! Messenger for Windows was a free messaging service that combined instant messaging with other Yahoo! services such as Yahoo! Mail. The classic client could alert you to new e-mail and linked to Yahoo! news, weather, sports and finance content, which you could share with your contacts. It was one of the longest-running chat services of its time, from a company that had been in the technology industry for more than two decades: it started in March 1998 as Yahoo! Pager and was renamed Yahoo! Messenger in 1999.

The build offered here (0.8.288) is the redesigned desktop app that Yahoo introduced in December 2015 to replace the classic client, which was switched off in August 2016. The classic client offered voice and video calls, IMVironments (themed chat windows), Audibles, invisible mode and offline messages. Like the classic Messenger, the new app puts you into instant contact with your friends and lets you send messages to them. It also keeps your past conversations with friends and lets you switch quickly between conversations. Yahoo! Chat, the public chat rooms once reachable from Messenger, had already been closed in December 2012.

Yahoo! Messenger for Windows supported file sharing among users, which had long been a popular feature. The redesigned app focused on sharing photos, GIFs and videos, including sending large numbers of photos at once, and it was designed to work for users with low connectivity or offline. The whole service was shut down on July 17, 2018, so the program can no longer sign in or send messages; the card remains for reference only.

Allowed users to see when their friends were online and to chat with them instantly.

Features:

• Instantly message friends and other users.
• Start and participate in private group conversations.
• Voice and video calls and plug-ins in the classic client
• Support for the ymsgr: URI scheme to start chats from links
• Like and unsend messages to other users