Set custom Auto-Away Message and Timeout in iChat

Posted by: ahimanshu on: October 4, 2010

• In: Mac
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iChat currently has an automatic auto-away feature that automatically sets your status to away upon being idle for 45 minutes. However, there isn’t any apparent way of customizing the auto-away message. You can, however, set a custom auto-away message by setting the AutoAwayMessage default in iChat’s defaults.

For example, running defaults write com.apple.iChat AutoAwayMessage "I went away" will set your auto-away message to "I went away." You may need to restart iChat to force the defaults to reload.

The auto-away timeout is also customizable. Although it defaults to 45 minutes, you can set it to any value greater than iChat’s default idle timeout, which is 600 seconds. Running the command defaults write com.apple.iChat AutoAwayDelay 600 will set the auto-away timeout to 600 seconds, or ten minutes.

You can also completely enable or disable auto-away with the AutoAway default (defaults write com.apple.iChat AutoAway -bool NO to disable, or YES to enable).

For more information visit

http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20060301185035270