Contacts are at the heart of instant messaging, and thus the Chat Core has a way to abstract to a "person" (represented by an imIContact instance), which might connect to multiple networks, etc.

Display Name

The display name used in the buddy list window or in conversations can come from several sources, by precedence order:

• User-set alias, stored locally (set when the user renames someone from Instantbird/Thunderbird)
• Server-stored alias (some protocol store the aliases online)
• Display name / Friendly name (set by the remote contact, stored on the server)
• Username, the unique identifier of the buddy for this protocol. Can be numbers (e.g. ICQ, QQ), email addresses (e.g. MSN, XMPP) or some other string.

Possible storage locations:

• mozStorage (the file blist.sqlite)
• purplexpcom (cached copy)
• libpurple (cached copy)
• server read/write (server-stored alias)
• server read only (display names)