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***** top seafarer site

Hotmail, Yahoo & Netscape messengers
http://www.msn.com;http://www.yahoo.com; http://www.icq.com All high data!

Chat with your contacts in real-time

For anyone with a Hotmail or yahoo email account (and it’s not too difficult to get either) messenger gives the ability to chat in real time with anyone else with the same messenger software installed on their PC. To be quite clear, Hotmail messenger is specific to Hotmail and yahoo to yahoo. This means you can type messages to each other and send and receive them instantly, like email but much, much better.

ICQ offers a similar service to those described above, and comes from Netscape, Microsoft’s rival in browser and Internet software.

For the seafarer messenger software can mean far better contact with family and friends, as well as the possibility of discussing ship operations with staff ashore. Although Inmarsat offer a free short messenger service via Inmarsat C, Internet based solutions are more interactive making a normal conversation easy and intuitive.

Packet data (MPDS) means that it is economical too, users only pay for the words they send and so a conversation can continue all day without running up the phone bill.

Messenger will let you know when one of your contacts logs in to the service. It is then simply a matter of clicking on their name to make a connection and start talking. The entire conversation is displayed in the window so you can go back over what’s been said.

You can let everyone know if you are unavailable for some reason: gone to lunch, connection down, on the phone etc. All the programs also have a voice capability, for speaking to contacts through the Internet connection.