Rudkin On Linux, Mac and Tech

For sometime now I have wondered why Apple had missed out the ability to set multiple identities for email accounts in their Mail.app on Mac OS X and iOS.

Yesterday I had the need to send an email from a different identity on my iPad, so I could do this I simply changed the email address in the settings, sent the email and then changed it back. This seemed a little cumbersome so I did a bit of searching on DuckDuckGo.

I discovered this 5 year old article that detailed that all you need to do is enter a comma-separated list of addresses in the “Email Address”. How simple is that?

Having got this working in Mail.app in Mac OS X I wondered if this would work in iOS on my iPhone and iPad, and guess what, it does!

It was a little tricky to setup on my iPhone as the comma character does not appear on any of the soft keyboards when editing the email address. The work around was to cut cut & paste the comma character from another app!

I am not sure if this is a well known feature or not, but as I didn’t know about it I figured that I would share it.

I recent versions of Ubuntu a handy little utility call apt-add-repository was created to make it easier and more friendly to add Launchpad PPAs to your Ubuntu installation. I recently discovered that this utility is not installed by default on the Ubuntu Server Edition (certainly this is the case for Ubuntu Server 10.04 LTS).

To add this useful utility, just run the following command from the command line or your server:-

sudo apt-get install python-software-properties

Once installed you will be able to add the Launchpad PPA of your choice as follows:-

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:nameofppa

You can add a PPA manually, but I find this a lot easier to remember!