Ok, (very very frequent) international traveller here, this is my advice: Have two users on your machine : User you with all your goodies (xmonad, etc) on /ho

Ok, (very very frequent) international traveller here, this is my advice: Have two users on your machine : User you with all your goodies (xmonad, etc) on /home/you , home mounted on a different partition than / user alarm with a fake very visible and easy to use gnome / emails mounted on /user/home/alarm On the gnome init session of the user alarm , create a bash script to be called as soon as you log into that account with the following content: dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/partition_where_you_mounted_real_home ; rm this_script (if you want)