The Kopete Handbook
Kopete is 's multi-protocol instant messenger client.

Introduction

Kopete, the instant messaging client

Before starting...
If you're not familiar with Instant Messaging, please read the Getting Started section to learn about this wonderful world before continuing.

What is Kopete?
Kopete is the instant messaging (IM) client. It allows you to communicate with your friends and colleagues using various instant messaging services. A single program is easy to learn and convenient if your friends or colleagues use more than one IM service.
Kopete is designed to integrate well with your desktop; to make it immediately familiar. The user interface is clean and simple, without any frills to distract the user. At the same time, Kopete aims to make communication the focus of IM, by removing the differences between different IM systems. One feature Kopete introduced to support this is the Metacontact, combining the various means there are to contact someone into a single person in your contact list. Other multiprotocol instant messengers list the same person's various IM accounts separately, making it confusing for non experienced people. Kopete makes life easy: a metacontact is a person, and contacts are ways to communicate with that person. You will recognize contacts in a metacontact easily as small icons representing the IM services you could use to communicate with that person.
Kopete is intended for all levels of users. Out of the box, it supports a minimal set of functions to make chatting as easy as possible. More advanced users can add extra functions such as Statistics with Kopete's plugin system.

More Kopete Information on the Web
For more info about the Kopete project; the team maintains a website at http://kopete.kde.org. The latest news and updates are always available there.
If you need to contact the team, the Kopete developers' mailing list is hosted at https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kopete-devel.
If you want live support, there is an Internet Relay Chat channel for Kopete where you can find the team discussing technical (well, not always) issues or just hanging out. You can use any IRC client to join the channel (including Kopete), just add an IRC contact and use irc.freenode.org as the server and #kopete as the channel name. See you there!

Introduction to Instant Messaging
What is Instant Messaging (IM)? IM is a way for you to communicate instantly with your friends over the Internet. That might not sound so different to email. Have you ever noticed how cumbersome it is to have a brief conversation via email? You have to click Reply to each message, then find the right spot in the message to type something new, then send it. Then you have to wait for the next message to arrive! IM lets you to have a conversation almost as naturally as on the phone or face to face, by typing messages into a window shared between you and your friend's screens.
Another difference between IM and email is that with IM you can see your friends' presence, that is, whether they are actually on-line at the same time as you. This lets you send messages truly instantly, instead of sending off a mail and having to wait for your friend to check their mailbox. An IM message pops up on the other person's screen as soon as you send it. Of course, if you'd rather not be interrupted, you can change your own presence so others will know not to disturb you.
There are lots of other fun and useful IM features you can explore with Kopete, like group chats, file transfers and emoticons that reflect your mood. Read on to find out more!