Perhaps your mail server has changed names. Perhaps you've grown tired of a certain layout for your appointments. Whatever the reason, you want to change your Evolution settings. This chapter will tell you how to do just that. To change your mail settings, select Settings Mail configuration in the Inbox. This will open the mail preferences window, illustrated in . Mail preferences are separated into several categories: Identities This allows you to create and alter one or more identities for your email. Sources This tab lets you tell Evolution where to get the mail sent to you, and how to get it. Mail Transport This tab lets you tell Evolution how to send mail. News Servers If you would like to use Evolution to read newsgroups, you can specify your news server preferences here. Other Miscellaneous mail and news settings, such as HTML handling preferences, and how long Evolution should wait before marking a message read.

Setting mail preferences

If you have only one email account, or send email from only one address, you will only need to configure one identity. If you want, however, you can have multiple identities. This can be useful if you want to keep personal and professional email separate, or if you wear several hats at work. To add a new identity, simply click Add. To alter an existing identity, click on it in the Identity tab of the Preferences window, and then click Edit. Evolution will then present you with a dialog box containing four fields: Full Name: by default, this is the same name as the full name described in your user account on your computer. You can select another if you wish. Email address: Enter your email address in this space. Organization: If you send email as a representative of a company or other organization, enter its name here. Signature file: You may choose a small text file to be appended to every message that you send. Typically, signature files include address or other contact information, or a favorite quotation. It's good form to keep it to four lines at the maximum. In order to send mail with Evolution, you need to connect to your network. To do that, you'll need to know your user name and password, what sort of mail sending and receiving protocols your network uses, and the names of the servers you'll be using. If you're switching from another groupware or email program, you can almost certainly use the same settings as you did with that program. Network-related settings are in the Mail Sources and Mail Transport tabs. The Mail Sources tab allows you to edit, add, or delete methods of retrieving mail from servers. Clicking on Add or Edit will bring up a dialog box to offer you the following options: Mail source type: Select from IMAP or POP servers, or Unix-style mbox or mh files. Server: Enter the name of the mail source server in this field. If you use an may or may not be the same as your SMTP server. Username: Enter the user name for the account you have on the server-- this should the part of your email address before the @. If you use mbox or mh files as your mail source, you do not need to enter a username. Authentication: Tell Evolution how to verify your identity with the server. Your options vary depending upon the type of server you are using, and the ways it is configured. Given the name of a server, Evolution can detect what sorts of authentication it offers. Test Settings Click this button to have Evolution check to see if mail sources are configured correctly. If you have several mail sources, clicking Get Mail will refresh any IMAP, mh, or mbox listings and check and download mail from all POP servers. In other words, Get Mail gets your mail, no matter how many sources you have, or what types they are. The Mail Transports tab lets you set how you will send mail. Evolution currently supports two mail transport options: SMTP, which uses a remote mail server, and sendmail, which uses the sendmail program on your local system. Sendmail is more difficult to configure, but offers more flexibility than SMTP. To use SMTP, you'll need to enter the name of your SMTP server. It may have the same name as your mail source server. Evolution can attempt to determine if you have entered a valid server name. To have it do so, click the Test Settings button. Newsgroups are so much like mailing lists that there's no reason not to keep them right next to your mail. When you first select the News Servers tab, you will see a blank box with the three familiar buttons on the right: Add, Edit, and Delete. Click Add to add a news server; you will be prompted for its name. Enter the name, click OK, and you're done. You can have as many mail servers as you like, of course. News servers will appear next to your IMAP servers in the folder bar. Not everything fits neatly into categories. This tab contains some miscellaneous configurations that don't have too much to do with each other. Send messages in HTML format If you check this box, you will send messages as HTML by default. If you leave it unchecked, your messages will be sent without HTML formatting unless you select Format HTML in the message composer. See for more information about HTML mail. Mark Messages as Seen After When you click on a message, Evolution will wait a moment before marking it as seen. You can set the delay, in milliseconds, here. Folder Format By default, Evolution saves its mail in the mbox format. You can switch to the mh format if you like. Note that this is an advanced feature and may cause you to lose some messages, so you should probably make a backup of your evolution directory first. In addition, it will take quite some time if you have a large mailbox. To set your calendar preferences, select Settings Calendar Configuration from the Calendar view. This will open up the Preferences window. It contains four tabs: Time display, Colors, To Do List and Alarms. The calendar preferences window is illustrated in .

If this worked on my job as well as my calendar...

The Time display tab lets you set the following: Time format You may choose between twelve-hour (AM/PM) and twenty-four hour time formats here by clicking the appropriate radio button. Weeks start on You can set weeks to start on Sunday or on Monday. Day range When does your work day start, and when does it end? In the day and week views, Evolution displays all the hours in the range you select here, even if there are no appointments for those times. Of course, you can still schedule an appointment outside of these hours, and if you do, the display will be extended to show it. The colors tab allows you to decide what color your calendar will be. The tab consists of a sample calendar on the right and a list of ten items that can be colored in different ways. If you click on the color button to the right of each item, you will bring up a color-selector window where you can choose to alter that color. By clicking OK in the color selection dialog, you can see the results of the color on the sample calendar. The display elements whose color you can set are: Outline: The lines between days and at the top of the display. Headings: Text color for day and month names and other headings. Empty days: This is the background color for any time slots in which you have no appointments. Appointments: This is the background color for any time slots in which you have appointments. Highlighted day: The background color for a selected time slot. Day numbers: Text color for date numbers. Current day's number: Text color for today's date. To-Do item that is not yet due: Text color for To-Do list items that are not yet due. (Or maybe background color? find out!) To-Do item that is due today: Text color for today's tasks. To-Do item that is overdue: Text color for overdue tasks. You can choose what information the To Do list displays and the way it is displayed. The two areas of the To Do List tab offer several options each: Show on To Do List This box contains three items. If you select the check boxes next to them, that information will appear in the To Do list for each task it contains: Due Date Time Until Due Priority Style Options Select among the following checkboxes to determine how your To Do list will look: Highlight overdue items Highlight items due today Highlight not yet due items The alarms tab enables you to select from three boxes: Beep on display alarms: select this box to have Evolution beep at you for any alarms you have set. If you leave this box unchecked, Evolution will only alert you to events by opening a dialog box. These beeps are distinct from full-fledged audio alarms. Audio alarms timeout after: Select this button to have your audio alarms stop automatically after a certain number of seconds. Enable snoozing for: If you would like to have the option to tell Evolution to repeat an alarm in a few minutes, select this button and decide how long you'd like it to wait. To set the behavior of your Contact Manager, click on the Contact Manager tab in the Preferences window. You can set the following options: To add a new LDAP server to your available contact folders, select Actions New Directory Server . This brings up a small dialog box which will let you enter the following options: Name — any name you choose for the server. Description — a longer description of the server. LDAP Server — the network address of the server. Port Number — by default, the port number is 389. Root DN — enter the root DN here. Additional configuration options will be covered here, as they become available.