The word "evolution" means "a process of improvement and development." The GNOME application Evolution is meant to be a more evolved groupware program, and an integral part of the Internet-connected desktop. Evolution is a suite of tools to help you work in a group. You can use it to send, receive, and organize email, manage address and other contact information, and maintain a calendar. It enables you to do those things on one or several computers, connected directly or over a network, for one person or for large groups. Evolution can handle almost all your communications tasks with the power and flexibility of the GNOME desktop environment. The developers of Evolution had four major goals for their project: The application must be both powerful and easy to use. That means a familiar and intuitive interface that users could customize to their liking, and the development of shortcuts for complex tasks. Evolution must meet and exceed the standards set by other groupware products. It must include support for most major network protocols so that it can integrate seamlessly with existing hardware and network environments. The project must support open standards and protocols to turn Evolution into an advanced development platform. From the simplest scripting to the most complex network and component programming, Evolution needed to offer developers an environment for cutting-edge application development. Data must be safe: Evolution must not lose mail or corrupt mailbox files. Evolution is designed to make most daily tasks faster. For example, it takes only one or two clicks to enter an appointment or an address card sent to you by email, or to send email to a contact or appointment. Evolution makes displays faster and more efficient, so searches are faster and memory usage is lower. People who get lots of mail will appreciate advanced features like vFolders, which let you save searches as though they were ordinary mail folders.

This version of the Evolution User's Guide is a draft. It is missing huge chunks of information, and many of the features it describes are unimplemented. All the content is subject to change, especially if you help. Please send comments on the guide to aaron@helixcode.com. Items that are known to need action are indicated as such, often with notation like (INSERT CONTENT HERE). If you would like to work on the guide please contact me or see the GNOME Documentation project web site. This paragraph will be removed in later versions of the manual. This book is divided into two sections. The first section is a guided tour— it will explain how to use Evolution. If you are new to Evolution or to groupware in general, this is the section for you. The second section, covering configuration, is targeted at advanced users and administrators. If you are a network administrator, you may find yourself referring to this section frequently. Some kinds of words are marked off with special typography. It's listed below: Applications Commands typed at the command line Labels for menu items and buttons Anything you type in Text output from a computer