This document is intended to help people quickly get started encrypting their Instant Messages on Mac OS X. Some background: is a free and open source instant messaging client for Mac OS X that supports multiple IM networks, including Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, Google Talk, AIM, ICQ and Jabber / XMPP., commonly referred to as OTR, is a cryptographic protocol that provides strong encryption for instant messaging conversations. Important: Known Limitations: - Adium is capable of having direct one-on-one chats as well as group chats. However, due to limitations of the OTR protocol, Adium does not support encryption during multi-user group chat. It only works in one-on-one chats. - Adium keeps unencrypted logs of OTR chats by default.

See Step 6 to learn how to disable logging of encrypted chat sessions. Now let's jump right in. Step 1: Download Adium Begin by opening your favorite web browser ( Safari, Firefox, Chrome, Tor Browser Bundle or the browser of your choice ) and loading up the Adium website: You will see the mascot for Adium, a green duck. Underneath the duck it will say 'Download Adium'.

Click on that link. You will be taken to the Adium project's download page at Sourceforge.net. That page will say 'Your download will start in 5 seconds.' And will count down to 0. The download will begin. The file that you get will be called Adium_x.y.z.dmg' where x.y.z is the version number.

For customers who use OS X, we recommend Adium as a suitable Jabber client. This software is based on the same basic code as Pidgin (also recommended), however the former has been directly developed and adapted for OS X. In order to install Adium, download the package and execute the *.dmg file in OS X.

At the time of this writing, the current version is 1.5.7. The download may take a while to complete, as it is over 20MB in size.

Step 2: Install Adium Open the Adium_x.y.z.dmg file by double clicking on it. In a default configuration the file will be in your Downloads folder inside your account's home directory. In the menu bar at the bottom of your screen, next to the recycle bin icon, there will be an icon for your Downloads directory.

Click on it and inside you should find the Adium.x.y.z.dmg file. Click on the file. A dialog box will open up saying 'Opening Adium_x.y.z.dmg' it will go through several stages: verifying, checking volumes, mounting. After a few seconds, a folder will open up containing the Adium application. If you have ever installed a Mac OS X application this should be familiar to you. Simply drag the Adium icon onto the Applications Folder icon that is also inside the folder.

This will install the application on your system. Step 3: Running Adium for the first time When you run Adium for the first time you will have the option to import your account information from other IM clients such as iChat. Or you can manually enter in your account information. If you don't have an instant messaging account on any of the supported services you can try creating an account on Calyx's free jabber server, jabber.calyxinstitute.org. To set up an account on the Calyx server, in Adium, navigate in the menu bar to File > Add Account > XMPP (Jabber).

For your jabber ID, choose a username and append @jabber.calyxinstitute.org. So for example if you choose 'mickeymouse' as your username then fill in '. Then choose a strong password.