How do you set up Gmail chat?

Just curious.

I use OSX Messages for Google Chat. Every message I send or receive goes straight to my inbox, which makes for a lot of clutter. How do I stop this and just get messages sent while I was offline in my inbox? My setup: To stop the weird issue of chats...

In regular Gmail, my friends' chat statuses show up as red, green, or greyed out. I know that if they're greyed out it might be because they're not signed in or because they've gone invisible. In Gchat on the iPhone/iPod Touch, there's a little more...

Does anyone have any recommendations on a good but cheapish (under $50/year) email provider? So right now I am using Yahoo Mail Plus, and although they haven't completely annoyed me, I feel like there are better options out there. I don't like the Gmail...

This is insanely rediculous, i am trying to set up a gmail account for email and chat, and any username i put in, says: sorry, you can only use letters (a-z), numbers (0-9) and (.) periods. Well first off, im not using the greek or russian alphabet so...

When I logged into Gmail recently, the contact list in my chat box was mostly populated by a number of instances of the word "sharfai" -- which corresponds in no way to any of my actual contacts, didn't show up in a Gmail search, and has next...

Am I overlooking any options for archiving/exporting Gmail chat statuses? Alternatively, are there any notetaking apps that are REALLY REALLY REALLY well-integrated with Gmail? I have a bad habit of using my Gmail chat status for frequent/constant notes...

Say I have two addresses: [email protected] and [email protected]. The main one is "aaa" so I go to settings and enable it to send emails "as if I were bbb" (confirmation in "bbb" received and accepted, etc). So I am using "...