Ever wish you could be two different people? Trade identities the way some fans trade baseball cards. Imagine for a moment that you could be one person when hanging out in the sports bar with your buddies on Saturday night, and another person while taking the wife and kids to church on Sunday morning. Some might argue that just choosing between the sports bar and church will make you a different person; but I’m talking about the kind of change even your mother could not spot. After all, you might not want to appear to be the same person in alt.fan.buckaroo-bonzai as you are in alt.medical.sales.jobs.resumes.
When you go online, appearing to be someone else is not that difficult. And while there is a small group of cyber criminals who trade identities to perpetrate fraud, there are also very good reasons to change who you appear to be online. Lets to take a look at a few reasons why you might want to maintain different identities, and how Thoth can help.
Before I go any further, if the idea of switching identities has you thinking cloak and dagger, James Bond, and getting away with something you shouldn’t: forget it. We are not talking license to kill here: we are talking Maxwell Smart in a phone booth with a fake moustache.
One of the biggest reasons to change identities is to keep your online life consistent with real life. Most of us have professional identities, and private ones, and usually, the two don’t mix. Do you have two email addresses, one for home, and one for the office? Then you already have two identities.
As SPAM becomes more vicious, and identity theft more prevalent, it is also becoming more common for Web veterans to have a few throwaway identities that help protect the real one. For example, I have one email address for my close friends, another for work, and two just for email list servers and public forums. While the latter two are often flooded with SPAM, my private address is still reasonably private.
When is comes to Usenet, there is also the added wrinkle of using different servers. Most ISP accounts provide at least basic Usenet access, plus you might have access to a server at work, and subscribe to Newsguy. Pile those variables on top of a two or three different email addresses, and suddenly you need a secretary to keep track of who you are.
Enter multiple personalities. Thoth has a feature called Personalities, which allows you to name a collection of settings and recall it whenever creating a new outgoing message. To create a new Personality, select New Personality from the File menu. A new message window will appear. You can add extra headers, a signature, select a server, an email address, and more. Don’t forget to click on the Edit Message Settings button to access more settings there. When complete, select Save As from the File menu and name your new personality. All your personalities will appear in the Open Personality submenu under the File menu. They can be edited there as well. To use your new Personality, select it from the popup menu inside a new message window. That is all there is to it.
Now whatever you do, don’t accidentally spout scripture in the bar or down a cold one during the sermon. |
"Split Personalities"
