ICQ Inside and Out

Be an ICQ Groupie

All ICQ contacts can be sorted into some general categories: family, friends, coworkers, and a few others. But in a full Contact List, it can be hard to separate your online cribbage buddies from the colleagues you stay in touch with during the workday. Fortunately, you can use the Groups feature to create easy-to-digest categories within your Contact List.

Gather the troops into groups. To use the Groups feature, open the Contact List. Just below the title bar of the Contact List window, you'll see a button with a little face on it--this is the User/Group toggle button. Click that button to switch between Group view and the default User view. Clicking the arrow to the left of a group name either expands or hides all the names within that group. You can move Contact List members into groups by dragging them one at a time. If you haven't organized your contacts by group, they'll all fall under the group named General.

Choose your group mode. ICQ lets you view groups in one of two modes. In Mode 1 (the default view), you see all of a particular group's members under the group name, with a bar separating those online from those offline. In Mode 2, you see two mirrored lists of groups: one under the header Online and one under Offline. Change modes by clicking (or right-clicking, depending on which button you've set to activate context menus) a group name, pointing to Group Mode, and choosing Mode 1 or Mode 2.

Send a bulk mailing. Groups provide a convenient way to send messages to multiple users. Just click or right-click (again, it depends on which button activates context menus) a group name, and select Send Message To, Entire Group. A new message window will open, preaddressed to all the members of that group. In the right pane of the new message window, you can add or remove message recipients by checking or unchecking the boxes next to individual names.