Quick questions about Adium

Great choice! Adium is a real gem. It's amazingly customizable.

1. Absolutely...I'm not even totally sure what's going on with yours if it's making you enter login details every time. You add the account once, and that's it. From then on, it logs into that account automatically unless you tell it not to. Adding the account is the same thing as telling MSN to "remember" the login details.

2. There's no email features that I'm aware of, but I don't use any email attached to my IM accounts so I'm not entirely sure.

 

Simply for chatting, as far as I know, but there may be some plug-ins that let you read mail from GMail or MSN. You can merely set your MSN to not log in on start-up, or just not put in a password.

Hope this helps!

 

When you first log on you'll get a message saying 'you have X new emails' and then a link to your hotmail inbox.
And if you get an email while chatting you'll get a popup message saying 'xxx@xyz.com has sent you an email'

For easy pop-up notifications I'd go and download growl (it works with more than just adium)

http://growl.info/

 

File -> Connect a Guest Account is the "Connect without 'adding' your account" that you want; I can imagine no reason you'd want to use it for your personal account on your personal computer, but it's quite useful if a friend wants to jump online for a bit on your computer.