Creating Alternate Personalities in Eudora

Eudora alternate personalities are aptly named. They allow you to:

1. Set up a single instance of Eudora to receive and send email using multiple email accounts, or
   
   
2. Set up a single instance of Eudora, with a single email account -- login id and incoming mail server -- to send email using different options. (Either cosmetically different, such as different From: name or address, signature or stationary, or technically different, such as using a different SMTP server for outgoing messages. Though you don't need that so much anymore, with the ACCC's authenticated SMTP server mail.uic.edu, which can be used from both on and off campus.)

The advantage to the first is obvious. If you had two phone lines, or even more, which would you you rather have: one phone on your desk that could answer any of the lines or a different phone for each line?

It might not be as obvious what using different options for the same account might do for you, but that can be every bit as useful:

• If you receive email with your regular mail that's addressed to an alternate netid -- my acccwebstaff@uic.edu email for example -- you can define an personality with a different name, return address, and default signature tailored specifically for that netid.
  
  
• If you use Eudora on a personal computer that is connected to the Internet in multiple ways -- say with a cable modem at home, an ethernet connection at work, and a dialin ISP telephone connection when the cable connection is down or you're on the road, you might need different "sending email" options for the different connections.

The ACCC is an ISP, even if you might not think of us as one. So if you use an ISP in addition to us, then you use more than one ISP.

These days, with all the junk email being sent, most Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are refusing to handle email that isn't obviously associated with itself or its clients. You might not think of the ACCC as an ISP, but when you're connected on the UIC campus through our network backbone or when you dialin using the ACCC's dialin telephone lines, that's what we're acting as -- your ISP.

And like any responsible ISP, we are now limiting our email-sending services (SMTP server) to messages that either:

(1) Originate on the UIC campus (including those sent from UIC machines such as tigger or icarus, coming in over the ACCC dialin lines, or sent through WebMail),

or:

(2) Are addressed to accounts in the uic.edu domain.

If you always use the same commercial ISP, then just set your email program up to use their SMTP server, and you're set.

But if you sometimes use one ISP, and sometimes another, you are left with a problem. On solution is to use one ISP's SMTP server by default, and set up an alternate personality that uses the other's SMTP server. Use one or the other personality to send email, depending on which ISP you are currently using. You don't have to worry if you get 'em mixed up; you'll find out soon enough when the ISP returns your note as being undeliverable!

Another solution if one of the ISPs is the ACCC is to use the ACCC's new authenticated SMTP server, mail.uic.edu. If you do, then you don't need to use an alternate personality at all, because mail.uic.edu works from on campus and from off campus. Your email program sends your netid and password (encrypted) to mail.uic.edu each time it sends an email message out, so mail.uic.edu knows you belong on campus, regardless of where you are coming from. And your password isn't in much danger of being snatched.