Evolution email is like other email programs in all the ways you would hope: It can sort and organize your mail in a wide variety of ways with folders, searches, and filters. It can send and receive mail in HTML or as plain text, and supports file attachments. It supports multiple mail sources, including IMAP, POP3, local mbox and mh files, and even NNTP messages (newsgroups), which aren't technically email. However, Evolution has some important differences. First, it's built to handle very large amounts of mail without slowing down or crashing. Both the filtering and searching functions were built for speed and efficiency on gargantuan mail volumes. There's also the Evolution vFolder, an advanced organizational feature not found in other mail clients. If you get a lot of mail, or if you keep every message you get in case you need to refer to it later, you'll find that feature especially useful. You can start reading email by clicking Inbox in the shortcut bar. By default, the Inbox is open when you start Evolution, and the first time you see your Inbox, there's a message in it from Helix Code welcoming you to the application. The Evolution Inbox, should look like the one in , which has a message from Helix Code. The message summary appears at the top, in the message list. The message itself is displayed below that, in the view pane. If you find the view pane too small, you can double-click on the message in the message list to have it open in a new window. Just like with folders, you can right-click on messages in the message list and get a menu of possible actions.

Inbox

Most of the mail-related actions you'll want to perform are listed in the Message menu in the menu bar. The most frequently used ones, like Reply and Forward, also appear as buttons in the toolbar, and almost all of them are duplicated in the right-click menu and as keyboard shortcuts, which tend to be faster once you get the hang of them. You can choose whichever way you like best; the idea is that the software should work the way you want, rather than making you work the way the it does. One of the ways Evolution lets you choose the way you work is the way it lets you sort your message lists. To sort by sender, subject, or date, click on the bars with those labels at the top of the message list. If you click twice, you'll sort them in reverse order. You can also right-click on the message header bars to get a set of sorting options, and add or remove columns from the message list. You can find detailed instructions on how to customize your message display columns in . You can also choose a threaded message view. Select View Threaded to turn the threaded view on or off. If the option selected, Evolution will attempt to associate related messages by using message ID numbers and the References, In-Reply-To, and Subject message headers. Messages which are related are then placed next to each other, so that it's easier to follow the thread of a conversation from message to message. Once you've read your mail, you may want to get rid of it. To mark a message for deletion, select it in the the message list by clicking on it once. Then click on the Delete button in the tool bar. The message now has a line through it, because you've marked it for deletion. If you really want to get rid of it, choose Expunge from the Folder menu. That will delete it permanently. If you want to keep it, click Delete again, and it will no longer be marked as deleted. At some point in the future, this feature will change to something a little less counter-intuitive. Now that you've had a look around the Inbox, it's time to check for new mail. Click Get mail in the toolbar to check your mail. If it's the first time you've done so, the mail setup assistant will ask you for the information it needs to check your mail (see for more information). Then, you need to enter your email password. Evolution will remember the password until you quit the application or until you select Settings Forget Passwords . Once it's validated the password, Evolution will check your mail. New mail will appear in the local Inbox if you're using a POP account, and in your IMAP folders if you use IMAP. If you get an error message instead of mail, you probably need to change your network settings. To learn how to do that, have a look at , or ask your system administrator. Newsgroups are so similar to email there's no reason not to read them side by side. If you want to do that, add a news source to your configuration (see ). The news server will appear as a remote server, and will look quite similar to an IMAP folder. When you click Get Mail, Evolution will also check for news messages. If someone sends you an attachment, a file attached to an email, Evolution will display the file at the bottom of the message to which it's attached. Text, HTML, and most images will be displayed within the message itself. For other files, Evolution will provide a link and icon at the end of the message. Click on that, and Evolution will ask you where you want to put the file. Once you've chosen a location and saved the file, you can open, move, copy, or execute it just like any other, using Nautilus or your favorite shell or file manager. As usual, there's a shortcut here: right-click on the link, and choose an application for the file: you can send an image straight to the GIMP, or a spredsheet straight to Gnumeric. Evolution can also display HTML-formatted mail, complete with graphics. HTML formatting will display automatically, although you can turn it off if you prefer. You can start writing a new email message by selecting File New Mail, or by pressing the Compose button in the Inbox toolbar. When you do so, the New Message window will open, as shown in .

Evolution Main Window

Enter an address in the To: field, a subject in the Subject: and a message in the big empty box at the bottom of the window, and press Send. That's easy, although it can get a little more complicated if you want. Evolution will send mail immediately unless you tell it to do otherwise by selecting File Send Later. That will add messages to the Outbox queue. Then, when you press Send in another message, or Get Mail in the main mail window, all your unsent messages will go out at once. I like to use "Send Later" because it gives me a chance to change my mind about a message before it goes out. That way, I don't send anything I'll regret the next day. To learn more about how you can specify message queue and filter behavior, see . You can also choose to save messages as drafts or as text files. Choose File Save or Save As to save your message as a text file. If you prefer to keep your message in a folder (the Drafts folder would be the obvious place), you can select File Save In Folder . You can probably guess the purpose of the buttons labelled Cut, Copy, Paste, Undo and Redo, but there's a bit more to sending mail that's less obvious. In the next few sections, you'll see how Evolution handles additional features, including large recipient lists, attachments, and forwarding. If you want to attach a file to your email message, you can drag it from your desktop into the message window, or click the button in the toolbar with a paper clip on it, labelled Attach. If you click the Attach button, Evolution will open a file selection dialog box, to ask you which file you want to send. Select the file and click OK. To see what files you've attached to the message you're composing, select View Show Attachments ; to hide them again, choose Hide Attachments. When you send the message, a copy of the attached file will go with it. Be aware that big attachments can take a long time to download. Evolution, like all email programs (at least, all the ones in current use) recognizes three types of addressee: primary recipients, secondary recipients, and hidden ("blind") recipients. The simplest way to direct a message is to put the email address or addresses in the To: field, which denotes primary recipients. However, it's considered bad form to have more than a few email addresses in this section. If you are sending mail to more than one or two people, consider the Cc: field. Hearkening back to the dark ages when people used typewriters and there were no copy machines, "Cc" stands for "Carbon Copy." Use it whenever you want to share a message you've written to someone else. When Susan sends an email to a client, she puts her co-worker, Tim, in the in the Cc: field, so that he know what's going on. The client can see that Tim also received the message, and knows that he can talk to Tim about the message as well. If you have a large number of recipients, or if you want to send mail to several people without sharing the recipient list, you should use Bcc:. "Bcc" stands for "Blind Carbon Copy", and means that people you put in the Bcc: field get the message, but nobody else sees their email address. They will still see the list of addresses from the To: and Cc: fields, though. Tim is sending an email announcement to all of his company's clients, some of whom are in competition with each other, and all of whom value their privacy. He needs to use the Bcc: field here. If he puts every address from his address book's "Clients" category into the To: or Cc: fields, he'll make the company's entire client list public. Don't assume it won't happen to you! If you have created address cards in the contact manager, you can also enter nicknames or other portions of address data, and Evolution will complete the address for you. If you enter a name or nickname that can go with more than one card, Evolution will open a dialog box to ask you which person you meant. Alternately, you can click on the To:, Cc:, or Bcc: buttons to get a list — potentially a very long one — of the email addresses in your contact manager. Select addresses and click on the arrows to move them into the appropriate address columns. For more information about using email together with the contact manager and the calendar, see and . To reply to a message, press the Reply button while it is selected, or choose Reply to Sender from the message's right-click menu. That will open message composer. The To: and Subject fields will already be filled, although you can alter them if you wish. In addition, the full text of the old message is inserted into the new message, either in italics (for HTML display) or with the > character (in plain text mode) before each line, to indicate that it's part of the previous message. People often intersperse their message with the quoted material as shown in .

Evolution Main Window

If you're reading a message with several recipients, you may wish to use Reply to All instead of Reply. If there are large numbers of people in the Cc: or To: fields, this can save substantial amounts of time. But be careful, and always make sure you know who is getting a message: one address could be a mailing list with thousands of subscribers. Susan sends an email to a client, and sends copies to Tim and to an internal company mailing list of co-workers. If Tim wants to make a comment to all of them, he uses Reply to All, but if he just wants to tell Susan that he agrees with her, he uses Reply. You're probably familiar with search and replace features, and if you come from a Linux or Unix background, you probably know what Find Regex does. If you aren't among the lucky who already know, here's a quick rundown of an important section of the Edit menu. Find Enter a word or phrase, and Evolution will find it in your message. Find Regex Perform a search for a regular expression, or "regex." Find Again Select this item to repeat the last search you performed. Replace Find a word or phrase, and replace it with something else. For all of these items, you have two additional choices. First, you can choose whether to Search Backwards, which will perform the search starting wherever your cursor is, and moving back towards the beginning of the document (normally, it goes the other way). Then, you can decide whether to have your search be Case Sensitive, meaning should it pay attention to the case of letters when locating a match. You can't normally use text treatments or pictures in emails, which is why you've probably seen people use far too many exclamation points for emphasis or use emoticons to convey their feelings. However, most of the newer email programs can include and display images and text treatments as well as basic alignment and paragraph formatting. They do this with HTML, just like web sites do. Some people do not have HTML-capable mail clients, or prefer not to receive HTML-enhanced mail because it is slower to download and display. Some people refer to HTML mail as "the root of all evil" and get very angry if you send them HTML mail, which is why Evolution sends plain text unless you explicitly ask for HTML. To send HTML mail, you will need to select Format HTML. Alternately, you can set your default mail format preferences in the mail configuration dialog. See for more information. HTML formatting tools are located just above the composition frame, and in the Insert and Format menus. Your message text will appear formatted in the composer window, and the message will be sent as HTML. The icons in the toolbar are explained in tool-tips, which appear when you hold your mouse over the buttons. The buttons fall into four categories: Headers and lists Choose Normal for a default text style, or Header 1 through Header 6 for varying sizes of header from large (1) to tiny (6). You can also select pre for preformatted text blocks, and three types of List Item. Text style Use these buttons to determine the way your letters look. If you have text selected, the style will apply to the selected text. If you do not have text selected, the style will apply to whatever you type next. The buttons are: Push B for bold text Push I for italics Push U to underline Push S for a strikethrough. Alignment Located next to the text style buttons, these three paragraph icons should be familiar to users of most word processing software. The leftmost button will make your text left-justified, the center button, centered, and the right hand button, right-justified. Indentation rules The button with the arrow pointing left will reduce a paragraph's indentation, and the right arrow will increase its indentation. Color Selection At the far right is the color section tool. You can choose from several colors by clicking on the arrow, or create your own custom color by clicking on the color box itself. If you have text selected, the color will apply to the selected text. If you do not have text selected, the color will apply to whatever you type next. There are three tools that you can find only in the Insert menu. Insert Link: Use this tool to put hyperlinks in your HTML messages. When you select it, Evolution will prompt you for the Text that will appear, and the Link, where you should enter the actual web address (URL). Insert Image: Insert Image: Select this item to embed an image into your email, as was done in the welcome message. Images will appear at the location of the cursor. Insert Rule: This will insert a horizontal line, or rule, into your document. You'll be presented with a dialog box which gives you the choice of size, percentage of screen, shading, and alignment; if you leave everything at the default values you'll get a thin black rule all the way across the screen. The composer is a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor for HTML. That means that if you enter HTML directly into the composer— say, <B>Bold Text</B>, the the composer will assume you meant exactly that string of characters, and not "make this text bold," as an HTML composition tool or text editor would. The post office forwards your mail for you when you change addresses, and you can forward mail when you get a letter by mistake. The email Forward button works in much the same way. It's particularly useful if you have received a message and you think someone else would like to see it. You can forward a message as an attachment to a new message (this is the default) or you can send it inline as a quoted portion of the message you are sending. Attachment forwarding is best if you want to send the full, unaltered message on to someone else. Inline forwarding is best if you want to send portions of a message, or if you have a large number of comments on different sections of the message you are forwarding. Remember to note from whom the message came, and where, if at all, you have removed or altered content. To forward a message you are reading, press Forward on the toolbar, or select Message Forward . If you prefer to forward the message inline instead of attached, select Message Forward Inline from the menu. Choose an addressee as you would when sending a new message; the subject will already be entered, but you can alter it. Enter your comments on the message in the composition frame, and press Send. I started with ten, but four were "Don't send spam." Don't send spam or forward chain mail. If you must, watch out for hoaxes and urban legends, and make sure the message doesn't have multiple layers of greater-than signs, (>) indicating multiple layers of careless inline forwarding. Always begin and close with a salutation. Say "please" and "thank you", just like you do in real life. You can keep your pleasantries short, but be pleasant! ALL CAPS MEANS YOU'RE SHOUTING! Don't write a whole message in capital letters. It hurts people's ears. Never write anything in email you wouldn't say in public. Old messages have a nasty habit of resurfacing when you least expect. Check your spelling and use complete sentences. Don't send nasty emails (flames). If you get one, don't write back. When you reply or forward, include just enough of the previous message to provide context: not too much, not too little. Happy mailing! Even if you only get a few email messages a day, you probably want to sort and organize them. When you get a hundred a day and you want to refer to a message you received six weeks ago, you need to sort and organize them. Fortunately, Evolution has the tools to help you do it. By default, the columns in a mail message list are an envelope icon indicating whether a message has been read (closed for unread, open for read), an exclamation point indicating priority, and the From, Subject, and Date fields. However, you can change that if you want. Right-click on one of the column headers to get a list of options: Evolution keeps mail, as well as address cards and calendars, in folders. You start out with a few, like Inbox, Outbox, and Drafts, but you can create as many as you like. Create new folders by selecting New and then Folder from the File menu. Evolution will as you for the name and the type of the folder, and will provide you with a folder tree so you can pick where it goes. When you click OK, your new folder will appear in the folder view. You can then put messages in it by dragging and dropping them, or by using the Move button in the toolbar. If you want to move several messages at once, click on the ones you want to move while holding down the CTRL key, or use Shift to select a range of messages. If you create a filter with the filter assistant, you can have mail moved to your folder automatically. Most mail clients can search through your messages for you, but Evolution does it faster. You can search through just the message subjects, just the message body, or both body and subject. To start searching, enter a word or phrase in the text area right below the toolbar, and choose a search type: Body or subject contains: This will search message subjects and the messages themselves for the word or phrase you've entered in the search field. Body contains: This will search only in message text, not the subject lines. Subject contains: This will show you messages where the search text is in the subject line. It will not search in the message body. Body does not contain: This finds every email message that does not have the search text in the message body. It will still show messages that have the search text in the subject line, if it is not also in the body. Subject does not contain: This finds every mail whose subject does not contain the search text. Then, press Enter. Evolution will show your search results in the message list. I once worked in the mail room of a large company, where my job was to bundle, sort, and distribute mail to the various mail boxes and desks throughout the building. Filters do that same job with email, but they lose much less mail than I did. In addition, you can have multiple filters performing multiple actions that may effect the same message in several ways. For example, your filters could put copies of one message into multiple folders, or keep a copy and send one to another person as well. Which is to say, it's quite a bit more flexible than an actual person with a pile of envelopes. Most often, you'll want to have Evolution put mail into different folders, but you can have it do almost anything you like. People who subscribe to multiple mailing lists, or who often need to refer to messages they have sent, find filters especially helpful to separate personal from list-related mail, but they're good for anybody who gets more than a few messages a day. To create a filter, open the filter assistant by selecting Tools Mail Filters .

The Filter Assistant

The filter assistant window contains a list of your current filters, sorted by the order in which they will be performed. From the drop-down box at the top of the window, choose Incoming to display those filters which are performed on incoming mail, and On Demand for those which are performed only when you want. The filter assistant also has a set of buttons: Add — Create a new filter. Edit — Edit an existing filter. Delete — Delete the selected filter. Up — Move the selected filter up in the list, so it will be performed sooner. Down — Move the selected filter down in the list, so it will be performed later. If you don't have any filters set up, the only one of those buttons you can click is Add. When you do that, (or when you click Edit with a filter selected), the Add Rule window appears. That window, shown in , is where you'll actually create your filtering rule.

Creating a new Filter

Enter a name for your filter in the Rule Name field, and then begin choosing criteria. Choose how many criteria you'd like by pressing Add Criterion and Remove Criterion. If you have multiple criteria, you should then decide whether to have the filter do its job only if all criteria are met, or if any criteria are met. For each of your filter criteria, you must first select what part of the message you want the filter to look at: Sender The author of the message. Recipients The recipients of the message. Subject The subject line of the message. Specific Header The filter can look at any header you want, even obscure or custom ones like X-Bonus or X-Archive. Enter the header name, and what you'd like to match inside it. Message Body The actual text of the message. Expression Enter a regular expression, and Evolution will search the entire message, headers and all, to match it for you. Date Sent You can filter messages by when they were sent: First, choose how you'd like to match the time— before, after and so forth. Then, choose the time. The filter compare the message's time-stamp to the system clock when the filter is run, or to a specific time and date you choose from a calendar. You can even have it look for messages within a range of time relative to the filter. For example, you could have the filter catch all messages sent less than a week before the filter is run. Date Recieved This works the same way as the Date Sent option, except that it compares the time you got the message with the dates you specify. Priority Emails have a standard priority range from -3 (least important) to 3 (most important). If you can persuade your friends and co-workers to use the priority levels honestly, you can filter with them as well. Now, tell it what to do with those messages. If you want multiple actions, click Add Action; if you want fewer, click Remove Action. And choose again: Move to Folder If you select this item, Evolution will put the messages into a folder you specify. Click the <click here to select a folder> button to select a folder. Forward to Address Select this, enter an address, and the addressee will get a copy of the message. Delete Marks the message for deletion. You can still get the message back, at least until you Expunge your mail yourself. Stop Processing Select this if you want to tell all other filters to ignore this message. If multiple filters copy the message to a different folders, you'll have multiple copies of the message. Assign Color Select this item, and Evolution will mark the message with whatever color you please. Assign Score Priority numbers alone don't work, so you can score emails on the same scale. Then, you can tell which ones you want to read, or have scored messages moved, copied, or colored in a subsequent filter. You're done. Click OK to use this filter, or Cancel to close the window without saving any changes. Incoming email that your filters don't move goes into the Inbox; outgoing mail that they don't move ends up in the Sent folder. If you move a folder, your filters will follow it. If filters aren't flexible enough for you, or you find yourself performing the same search again and again, consider a virtual folder. Virtual folders, or vFolders, are an advanced way of viewing your email messages within Evolution. If you get a lot of mail or often forget where you put messages, vFolders can help you stay on top of things. A vFolder is really a hybrid of all the other organizational tools: it looks like a folder, it acts like a search, and you set it up like a filter. In other words, while a conventional folder actually contains messages, a vFolder is a view of messages that may be in several different folders. The messages it contains are determined on the fly using a set of criteria you choose in advance. As messages that meet the vFolder criteria arrive or are deleted, Evolution will automatically place them in and and remove them from the vFolder contents list. When you delete a message, it gets erased from the folder in which it actually exists, as well as any vFolders which display it. Imagine a business trying to keep track of mail from hundreds of vendors and clients, or a university with overlapping and changing groups of faculty, staff, administrators and students. The more mail you need to organize, the less you can afford the sort of confusion that stems from an organizational system that's not flexible enough. vFolders make for better organization because they can accept overlapping groups in a way that regular folders and filing systems can't. To organize my mail box, I set up a vFolder for emails from my friend and co-worker Anna. I have another one for messages from anybody at work that have "Evolution" in the subject line, so I can keep a record of what people from work send me about Evolution. If Anna sends a message about a picnic on Saturday, it only shows up in the "Anna" folder. When Anna sends me mail about the user interface for Evolution, I can see that message both in the "Anna" vFolder and in the "Internal Evolution Discussion" vFolder. To create a vFolder, select Tools vFolder Editor . This will bring up a dialog box that looks suspiciously like the filter window (for more information on filters, see ), and which presents you with a list of vFolders you have previously created. If you have created any vFolders, they are listed here, and you can select, edit or remove them if you wish. If you have not created any, there will be only one available option: click Add to add a new vFolder. You can enter a name for your vFolder in the Name. Then, tell Evolution what messages to look for. This process is exactly like filter creation: decide between Match all parts and Match any part, then choose what part of the message to look in, what sort of matching to perform, and specify exactly what it is that you want to find, be it a line of text, a score, a regular expression, or a particular date or range of dates. The second part, however, is slightly different. In the section of the window labelled vFolder Sources is a list of folders in which Evolution will search for the contents of your vFolder. Click Add to add a folder, or Remove to remove one. That way, you can have your vFolder search in newsgroups, or just in one of your mailboxes, or just in a select few folders you've already screened with filters. The vFolder creation window is shown in

Creating a vFolder Rule

Evolution lets you handle your IMAP and newsgroup subscriptions with the same tool: the subscriptions manager. To start using it, choose Settings Manage Subscriptions .