Did it happen to you? You received an email and the first thing you would like to do is to give a reaction on it, but not by email. So you switch to your instant messaging client and/or IRC client and look if that person is online via MSN, Jabber or IRC. Well KDE 3.3 has made that a lot easier. A step-by-step manual:

The requirements are KMail, KAddressBook and Kopete (Konversation should do as well). Make sure KMail is configured and fully functional for email, and Kopete is well configured for IRC, Jabber and/or MSN and/or any other protocol.

If an email comes in from a contact you know, the first thing you have to do is to add it to your address book. This can be achieved by right clicking the address and choosing the entry Add to Address Book.

If you know the nickname which the user uses on, for example, IRC, go to Kopete. Go to File->Add contact. In the wizard, select the checkbox at the bottom called Use the KDE address book for this contact and choose Next. Select the right Address Book entry for that contact and press Next. Now you can set the display name and the group it belongs to for Kopete. In the next screen select which protocol should be used if you have set up more than one protocol. You can select more than one protocol. After that, depending on the protocol, there will be some other questions, which you can answer as you like.

Although we did specify to choose from the address book, Kopete has not automatically linked your contact to the address book. So select the contact and choose Edit->Properties. On the General tab check the box labeled Has address book entry. Press ... and select the contact. Close these two windows.

Now go to your addressbook, if you select the contact you will see that it shows an extra field Presence, followed by the current status. This status will automatically update as soon as the contact goes away, offline, online, and so on. Now go to KMail, select another email and return to the original email (in other words: reload the current email). You can now see behind the email address the current state of your contact.

If you want to chat with this person, just right click the address in KMail and choose Chat With.... Your Instant Messenger will start a conversation with the contact.