My New Mac, Lion Edition

Setting Up an iChat Account

Before you can use iChat, you need to set up an iChat account, which you can do in one of three ways:

• Use an existing MobileMe email account.

• Create or use an existing AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) account.

• Create or use an existing Google Talk or Gmail account (the latter includes an instant messaging function, so if you already have a Gmail account, you don’t need to create a separate Google Talk account).

An AIM (http://www.aim.com/), Gmail (http://mail.google.com/), Google Talk (http://www.google.com/talk/), or Yahoo! (http://mail.yahoo.com/) account is completely free to create. If you have an old MobileMe account, you can use that too. You only need to create an AIM, Gmail, Google Talk, or Yahoo! account once. If you ...