AaronWeber 2000Aaron Weber and Helix Code, inc. PUT THE RIGHT LEGALNOTICE IN HERE Windows, Exchange, and Outlook are trademarks of Microsoft Corp. Lotus and Lotus Notes are trademarks of The Louts Corporation. Macintosh and Apple are trademarks of Apple Computer, Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. This is version 0.0 of Evolution manual.

Evolution is a suite of groupware applications for mail, contact management, and calendaring. It is included in the package Evolution, which is a part of the GNOME desktop environment. This document describes version &version; of Evolution What that means is that Evolution is your personal secretary. It can keep track of memos, emails, and appointments for you and for everyone in your office. Evolution can be started by selecting Evolution from SUBMENU submenu of the Main Menu, or by running the command evolution on the commandline. As was said before, Evolution can be used to send and recieve email, manage address and other contact information, and maintain This section describes basic usage of Evolution in each of those functions. As with most of Linux, there's more than one way to do things, and you should pick whichever one strikes you as most appropriate. When you first start Evolution, you see the Main window, as shown in the following figure. From there, you should select which features you wish to use by clicking on their icons in the left-hand navigational column. The Mail features can be accessed by clicking on the Mail, and likewise for other features.

Evolution Main Window

This chapter covers the use of the Evolution Mailer. Configuration of the mail client is discussed in . If you are already accustomed to other email programs, you can probably skip the mail sending and checking sections. The more complex functions, such as filtering, organizing, and searching mail, have some features that are not found in other email programs, and even power users may wish to review these sections of the guide. You can start writing a new email message by selecting New Mail from the FilMenu, or by pressing NEW-MESSAGE-COMBO. When you do so, the New Message window will open, as shown in .

Evolution Main Window

You can pick recipients in several ways: The TO: field is for the primary recipients of the message your are going to send. It is considered bad form to have more than a few email addresses in this form. If you want to send a copy of the message to someone, you may also use the Cc: field. "Cc" stands for "Carbon Copy"-- Those people will recieve a copy of the message. They will see the rest of the message list, and are noted as secondary recipients of the message. If you have a large number of recipients, or if you want to send mail to several people without telling them that it's gone to multiple people, you should use BCC. BCC stands for "Blind Carbon Copy". Addresses entered into this field will recieve the message but the message headers will not see the rest of the recipient list. Enter a subject into the Subject: field. Enter the text of your message into the Message: text area. If you want to attach a document to your email message, you can do so by . If the people you are sending a message to can read HTML mail, you can embed an image into the mail. Otherwise, it's best to attach images, just like other documents. Be aware that a large attachment will take a long time to download. Click Send or press SENDCOMBO to send the mail. Evolution will send mail immediately unless you set it to do so otherwise. It also checks for new mail every time you send mail. If you want, however, you can queue your messages to be sent at a later time, and also set your preferences to check mail on a regular basis, and alert you whenever it finds new messages. I like to use "Send Later" because it gives me a chance change my mind about a message before it goes out, and I have Evolution set to check my mail every ten minutes, and beep when I get mail that it thinks isn't spam. Use the Mail Preferences to specify message queue and filter behavior. Preferences are discussed in . If you only get a few messages a day, you probably don't need to to sort or organize them. When you get several hundred each day, and when you want to refer to a message you've recieved six weeks ago, you want a real organizing system. This section will cover the mail sorting and organization: folders, searches, vFolders, and filters. You can create new folders by selecting ITEM from the MENU, or by pressing SENDCOMBO. Move mail to them by selecting ITEM from the MENU, or by pressing SENDCOMBO. An email message can be in only one folder at a time, just like real mail in real folders. If you forget where an email is, you can search for it. If you find that you want an email to be in several places at once, you should consider creating a vFolder, or virtual folder. Because Evolution automatically creates an index of every email you recieve, it can search through your old messages and present you with the results in short order. If you find yourself performing a search frequently, you can save it as vFolder. Virtual Folders, or vFolders, are one of the more advanced features of Evolution. If they confuse you, you don't have to use them. However, if you get a lot of mail, and find yourself referring to messages, looking for old email, or just living in your email client, you'll probably want to use them. Basically, a vFolder is a saved search, which you can access the same way you would a normmal folder. There are several important differences between the two, however, which come from the fact that a conventional folder actually contains a message, but a virtual folder is really a different view of all your email. This means that while a message can be in several vFolders, it can be in only one conventional folder. Also, you cannot add or delete a message from a vFolder, and when you delete a message from a conventional folder, it will disappear from all your vFolders--a search can't find a deleted message. I have a vFolder set up for all the mail about a project I'm working on, and another one for all the mail from my friend Bernie. If Bernie sends me mail about the project, I can see that message both in the "Bernie" folder and in the "Project" folder. That's because when I open up the "Bernie" folder, I'm really performing a search for all the mail from Bernie, and when you open the "Project" folder you're really performing a search for all the mail about the project. That particular message actually resides in some other folder, maybe just in my Inbox. I can't delete it from the vFolder, because the vFolder is really a different view of my messages. When I delete it from the Inbox, I have also removed it from all my vFolders, because no search can find a deleted message. Filters sort your email for you, automatically. You can access the Filter functions of the email client by . Email starts in your Inbox. As it arrives, it is indexed and filtered from ther. Any email that does not meet filter action criteria remains in the Inbox. To create a filter, f you have filters enabled, To begin using the calendar, select Calendar from the main navigational frame. This will cause the calendar component of Evolution to become active. This is illustrated in the figure below:

Evolution Contact Manager Window

... ... ... ... ... ... To change default settings, select Preferences command in Settings menu. This launches the Preferences dialog, shown in .

Preferences dialog

This appendix describes known bugs and limitations of Evolution. Please contact the appropriate people if you find one we have not listed, or if you have a patch to fix one. The program currently does not work. At all. Evolution was written by: Seth Alves: alves@helixcode.com Anders Carlssonandersca@helixcode.com Damon Chaplin:damon@helixcode.com Clifford R. Conover rusty@zootweb.com Miguel De Icaza: miguel@helixcode.com Arturo Espinoza arturo@nucleu.unam.mx Larry Ewing: lewing@helixcode.com Bertrand Guiheneuf: bertrand@helixcode.com Tuomas Kuosmanen: tigert@gimp.org Christopher J. Lahey: clahey@helixcode.com Matthew Loper: matt@helixcode.com Dave Mason dcm@redhat.com Federico Mena: federico@helixcode.com Eskil Heyn Olsendeity@eski.dk Nat Friedman: nat@helixcode.com Ettore Perazzoli:ettore@helixcode.com Russell Steinthal: rms39@columbia.edu Peter Teichman: peter@helixcode.com Chris Toshok: toshok@helixcode.com Radek Doulik: rodo@helixcode.com Dan Winship: winship@helixcode.com Michael Zucchi: notzed@helixcode.com and other dedicated GNOME programmers. TheEvolution code owes a great debt to GNOME-pim, KHTMLW and the developers of Evolution acknowledge the efforts and contributions of its members. For more information please visit Evolution Web page. Please send all comments, suggestions, and bug reports to the GNOME bug tracking database. Instructions for submitting bug reports can be found on-line at http://bugs.gnome.org/Reporting.html. If you are using GNOME 1.1 or later, you can also use command bug-buddy for submitting bug reports. This manual was written by Aaron Weber (aaron@helixcode.com) with the help of the application programmers. Please send all comments and suggestions regarding the manual to the GNOME Documentation Project at docs@gnome.org. You can also add your comments online by using GNOME Documentation Status Table. ... ... ...