Dave Taylor answers free tech support questions about a wide variety of business and technical topics, including blogging, iphone help, ipod help, AdSense, MySpace, Sony PSP help, Mp3 players, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Linux, SEO, Mac OS X, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Why aren't my LiveMessage alerts working?

Dave, I signed up for LiveMessage alerts so I'd get neato little pop-up notifications of your new postings in my IM client, but... it doesn't work. Any ideas? Oh, just for the record, I like what you write, but it definitely doesn't mean I always agree with you!

Dave's Answer:

First off, thanks for signing up and I'm delighted that you like LiveMessage. I think it's pretty cool too. But a funny thing happened on the way to the forum...

I also had a problem with not receiving the alerts from the MSN Messenger system in my IM client, so I cornered one of the tech folk at LiveMessage and we went back and forth trying to ascertain the problem.

All the while, I was forgetting to tell him the most critical snippet of information: I don't actually run MSN Messenger as my day-to-day IM client. I use the far superior Adium X, a multi-system client that lets me stay logged in to MSN, AIM and YIM all within a single app.

And of course, that was the problem. Once I switched back to MSN Messenger for a test, the alerts came through just fine. So, could that be your problem here? Are you actually running MSN Messenger, or are you running one of the many other IM clients available for Mac or Windows?

If that's not the problem, pop over to alerts.msn.com and check in "My Recent Alerts" to see if you've received any alerts from Ask Dave Taylor according to MSN, then double-check that you're enabling MessageCast to send you alerts (which should have happened automatically when you signed up).

Dear reader, if you haven't signed up for LiveMessage Alerts and you're an IM user, why not try it out? Just sign up here and see what it's like!

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Categorized: Windows Help (Article 3809)
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I do have a comment, now that you mention it!