setting the window title for remote shell

[Ross Boylan]

MAIN QUESTION
I often ssh through a series of systems, run screen on the last system, 
start emacs in the screen window and then start up a bash shell.  I 
would like it if the system window title reflected the system, and 
possibly the directory, I am in.

Various sources suggest
   echo -ne '\e]0;Title\a'
or building it in to the command prompt.

When I tried executing the command from a shell running under emacs it 
had no effect.  I suspect emacs eats the non-printing characters.  If I 
start another window under screen, running bash directly, executing the 
echo command does change the window title. The first step of the chain 
was running a cygwin bash shell (mintty) under Windows 7 (though other 
times I start from Linux using Konsole).  The remote systems were all 
Debian GNU/Linux.

How can I get this to work?

DESIRED BEHAVIOR
I'm not entirely sure what the best behavior would be.  To make it most 
like the non-emacs shell it would display the host and current 
directory, meaning it would have to change when the directory in the 
shell changes.  And for other buffers I suppose the window title should 
show the directory and filename, or the buffer title.  I often have 
multiple non-graphical emacs windows (frames?) open at once (e.g., via 
C-x 3).

Alternately, perhaps the window title should just have the user and host.

POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS/RELATED DISCUSSION
For that latter mode, the solution suggested in this thread 
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/screen-users/2008-11/msg00008.html 
might work, though as far as I can tell it has nothing directly to do 
with emacs (it's a modification to ssh).

For emacs proper I found references to 
http://www.splode.com/~friedman/software/emacs-lisp/src/xterm-frobs.el, 
but that code is quite old (2009 or earlier) and I'm not confident it 
will work with relatively recent emacs.

There was also a long discussion "console-mode frame title sets Xterm 
title" in 2003 
(http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2003-09/msg00534.html) 
but I'm not sure what came of it, or how relevant it is (because I'm not 
sure what "frame title" refers to).

Thanks for any help.
Ross Boylan