A need has arisen here recently for me to need to “change” the headers on an email, so I can tell two people at work apart.  Both have their name in the email header the same.  Let’s call them “John Doe.”  So in order to tell them apart, I’ve added a reverse alias rule to mutt to handle this.  First enable the use of them by using

set reverse_alias

Then set up the alias.  This can be added to your alias file, or straight into your .muttrc

alias fake_john john_doe2@example.com (Fake John Doe)

Now all mail that comes in from john_doe2@example.com will show up as from “Fake John Doe” but the headers will remain the same, and no one is the wiser.

Something I’ve found very interesting, is the recent trend to move apps away from the desktop, and out into the “cloud.” Now, for the most part I agree with this. I rejoiced the day I moved from a pop3 account to an imap account. And then rejoiced again, when I moved my mail hosting to Google Apps. This is just the way most things are moving.  Most people don’t need apps outside of email and word processing.  And if that information can be stored in the cloud then that means I don’t have to be without my documents.

That brings me to the real point.  If you haven’t gotten a chance to check out some of the apps that make desktop apps out of web apps, try them.

• I like fluid for OSX, it seems a little more full featured
• Then Prism is looking really promising for all platforms (yes, even linux)

So, I’ve figured out how to add in a “fail-safe” to the perpetual screen, so that if you want to ssh without starting screen you can.  And it’s pretty easy.  First add the following to your sshd_config and restart ssh

AcceptEnv NO_SCREEN

Then add the following to the bottom of you .bashrc:   (Note: I named my screen ‘main’ you can name yours whatever you want)

NO_SCREEN=`echo "."$NO_SCREEN`
# Hack to get around if the variable is not set

if [ $TERM = "screen" ]
# If we are already in a screen do nothing
then
     echo -n ""
elif [ $TERM = "dumb" ]
# If we are using scp do nothing
then
     echo -n ""
elif [ $NO_SCREEN = ".true" ]
# Our fail safe to ssh w/o screen
then
     echo -n ""
else
# Startup screen
     screen -Rd main && exit
fi

Then, you can either ssh like normal to start the screen, or do the following to login without screen starting

export NO_SCREEN=”true”

ssh -o “SendEnv NO_SCREEN” user@host

Works like a champ