online-times in Yahoo Messenger

Hi to everybody,

I am not all too good with computers due to my age but I have a question about the Yahoo Messenger.

Is there a way to find out the online times of a contact?

Background of my question: my wife and I have got a son who is currently doing travels in South America. Because of bad cell phone connections in many regions, our only means of staying in contact with him is via messenger (he has got an old laptop computer with him and makes use of internet cafés to stay in contact with us).

For several days now, we haven’t heard a word from him. My wife and myself are starting to get worried because we do not know whether we just missed him trying to contact us or whether there are any technical problems that prevent him from getting in contact with us. Or – and that is what we are most afraid of – that something has happened to him (an accident, being sick or maybe even worse).

I have discovered that when one has the screen opened in which one can see the typed messages that are transmitted back and forth between him and the two of us that there is a line that states that our son logged on or logged off to the messenger. But there is always only one line and if he logged on and logged off sometime later one can only see the time of logging off.

Is there any possibility to find out the logon and logoff times of our son by maybe having a separate line written in this screen I have just described? Or is there another possibility to get hold of his online times? If he’s available only in the middle of the night and we would know about that in the morning the two of us could sleep much better, knowing that he would have been available to contact us. Or if we saw that he was always online for some seconds only we could guess that there might be technical problems with his connection.

We only would have to get worried if there weren’t any log-ons at all.

Maybe somebody can help us with this question…?

Thank you very much,
Agnew