Documentation

Blocking and unblocking contacts

Blocking is used to prevent communication from a specific contact. Once a contact has been blocked, you will appear offline to them and they will be unable to send messages to you. For all services except MSN, they also will appear offline to you, and you will be unable to see their status.

  • Blocked contacts appear in your Contact List with this status icon.

though some Adium Status Icons packs may have a different icon for blocked contacts.

Blocking a contact in chat

There are two ways:

  1. Click on the "Block" icon on the toolbar of the chat window (Clicking this symbol again will unblock the contact) or
  2. Right-click on the chat tab containing the spam and click "Block"

Blocking a contact in the contact list

Select the Contact in the Contact List.

  • From the Contact menu, select Block or
  • Right-click the contact and select Block.

Unblocking a contact

  1. Navigate to your Privacy Settings page via the Adium menu.
  2. Select the user you wish to unblock.
  3. Click the "-" button.

Setting up Privacy Settings

From version 1.0 onwards:

  1. Choose Privacy Settings... from the Adium menu.
  2. A window will appear.

The menu can utilize different privacy levels and manipulate allow and block lists for each account. Adjust your privacy level to an appropriate one, and add or remove contacts using the "+" and "-" buttons.

  1. Allow lists
    • Allow All Contacts
    • Allow certain contacts
    • Allow only users on my contact list is the quickest way to block spammers:
  2. Block lists
    • Block certain contacts

Note: Unfortunately, not all services support all privacy settings; Adium does not currently present this information as clearly as it should. This will hopefully be fixed at a later point on the libpurple level (See here for more information).

Services and the Privacy Settings they support

AIM

  • Supports: All privacy settings displayed by Adium.

MSN

  • Supports: Allow certain contacts and Block certain contacts.
  • Allow only users on my contact list setting actually adds all contacts currently on your list to the allow list and sets Allow certain contacts. (Restart Adium if the change is not reflected)
  • It should also be noted that Allow all contacts is the same as Block certain contacts, so selecting Allow all contacts won't remove the block list stored on the server.

Yahoo

  • Supports: Allow All Contacts and Block certain contacts.
  • All settings except Allow All Contacts will enable your Block list and block only those contacts. (Restart Adium if the change is not reflected)

ICQ

  • Supports: Block certain contacts except that they aren't really blocked and are still able to send you messages, they just can't see if you are online or not. So this privacy option resembles ICQ's "invisible lists".