How to Use
Enable the archives in Yahoo Messenger
Search and Find the archive files
Decode an archive file
 
Enable the archives in Yahoo Messenger

Click to enlarge it. 		If you want Yahoo Messenger to create the archive files you must, first of all, activate the archive system. You open the program and the first step is to log-in. You click on the ‘Messenger’ component from the menu and then you click on ‘Preferences’. Here you move the mouse on the left side on the element named ‘Archive’. Now, you must mark, in the left side, ‘Yes, save all my messages’. To finish, you must click ‘Ok’. If you need more help, visualize the image in the left.
 
Search and Find the archive files

Click to enlarge it. 		To begin, you must find the location where Yahoo Messenger was installed. In general, it is found in ‘Program Files’ under the name ‘Yahoo!’. Once you found it, you will see many directories. Now, we are interested in finding the ‘Messenger’ directory, and the subdirectory ‘Profiles’. There you will find directories that have as naming the Messenger ID’s of those who used the respective computer. If you see the image in the left, you will identify two persons: ‘liviu2021’ and ‘pablo_k200’. We expand the ‘pablo_k200’ directory and if this person had the archive activated, we will see the ‘Archive’ directory and inside it the ‘Messages’ directory that contains subdirectories with the ID’s of every person that he discussed with. In our case, we are interested to read the conversation that ‘pablo_k200’ had with ‘lady_D23’. It seems that they had two conversations; the two conversations are found in the files ‘20071218-pablo_k200.dat’and ‘20080221-pablo_k200.dat’. We can notice the date when the conversations took place even from the files names.
 
Decode an archive file

Click to enlarge it. 		The first step is to upload the file with the wished archive. In our case, if we follow the presentation from the precedent section, we upload the file ‘20080221-pablo_k200.dat’. The upload is made with a click on the button ‘Upload’. We continue with the introduction of the person with whom ‘pablo_k200’ had the conversation - that means ‘lady_D23’. We are accepting the terms by checking on the respective box and we click the button ‘Decode Now’.