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 message list has columns with the following headings: an envelope icon indicating whether you have read or replied to a message (closed for unread, open for read, and open with an arrow on it to indicate you've sent a reply), an exclamation point indicating priority, and the From, Subject, and Date fields. You can change their order and remove them by dragging and dropping them. You can add new ones with the Field Chooser item in the right click menu for the column headings. Right-click on one of the column headers to get a list of options: Sort Ascending Sorts the messages top to bottom. Sort Descending Sorts the messages bottom to top. Group By this Field Groups messages instead of sorting them. (FIXME: Explain further) Remove this Column Remove this column from the display. You can also remove columns by dragging the header off the list and letting it drop. Field Chooser A list of column headers; just drag and drop them into place between two existing headers. A red arrow will appear to show you where you're about to put the column. 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. When you've entered your search phrase, press Enter. Evolution will show your search results in the message list. If you think you'll want to return to a search again, you can save it as a virtual folder by selecting Store Search as Virtual Folder. When you're done with the search, go back to seeing all your messages by choosing Show All from the Search drop-down box. If you're sneaky, just enter a blank search: since every message has at least one space in it, you'll see every message in the folder. If you'd like to perform a more complex search, open the advanced search dialog by selecting Advanced... from the Search drop-down menu. Then, create your search criteria (each with the same options you saw in the regular search bar), and decide whether you want to find messages that match all of them, or messages that match even one. Then, click Search to go and find those messages. You'll see a similar approach to sorting messages when you create filters and virtual folders in the next few sections. Filters work very much like the mail room in a large company. Their purpose is to bundle, sort, and distribute mail to the various folders. 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, and it can do that in under a second. Which is to say, it's faster and 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 get lots of mail, or who often need to refer to old messages, find filters especially helpful, but they can greatly benefit anybody who gets more than a few messages a day. To create a filter, open the filter assistant by selecting Settings Mail Filters .

The Filter Assistant

The filter assistant window contains a list of your current filters, sorted by the order in which they are used. From the drop-down box at the top of the window, choose Incoming to display filters for incoming mail, and Outgoing for those which sort only outgoing mail. 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 gets applied first. Down — Move the selected filter down in the list, so it comes into play later. If you don't have any filters set up, the only one of those buttons you can click is Add, which will open a dialog to let you add a filter rule. If you do have filters, you can either add a new filter rule, or select one from your list and click Edit. The filter rule editor, 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 the criteria you'd like to use as you sort your mail. 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 filter criterion, you must first select which of the following parts of the message you want the filter to examine: Sender The sender's address. 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. Enter the header name in the first text box, and put your search text in the second one. Message Body Search in the actual text of the message. Expression For programmers only: match a message according to an expression you write in the Scheme language, used to define filters in Evolution. Date Sent Filter messages according to the date on which they were sent: First, choose the conditions you want a message to meet — before a given time, after it, and so forth. Then, choose the time. The filter will 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 &mdash perhaps you're looking for messages less than two days old. 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). You can have filters set the priority of messages you recieve, and then have other filters applied only to those messages which have a certain priority. Regex Match If you know your way around a regex, or regular expression, put your knowledge to use here. Source Filter messages according the server you got them from. You can enter a URL or choose one from the drop-down list. This ability is only relevant if you use more than one mail source. Now, tell it what to do with those messages. If you want more actions, click Add Action; if you want fewer, click Remove Action. And choose again: Copy 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. 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, because whatever you've done with it so far is plenty. Assign Color Select this item, and Evolution will mark the message with whatever color you please. Assign Score If you know that all mail with "important" somewhere in the message body line is important, you can give it a high priority score. In a subsequent filter you can then arrange your messages by their priority score. 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. You can tell Evolution to filter by mailing list. This means that Evolution will look at the mailing list address, and find out automatically what list this is. If you are subscribed to mailing lists, you should use the Filter by List instead of by sender. Kevin subscribes to bananas@ximian.com. However, there is also a bananas@ximian.org address. If he used a regular Filter by Sender, he would need to specify one for each address. However, Filter by List will recognize that both of them are the same list. 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, virtual folders can help you stay on top of things. A virtual folder 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 virtual folder 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 virtual folder criteria arrive or are deleted, Evolution will automatically place them in and remove them from the virtual folder contents list. When you delete a message, it gets erased from the folder in which it actually exists, as well as any virtual folders 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. Virtual folders 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 virtual folder for emails from my friend and co-worker Anna. I have another one for messages that have "ximian.com" in the address and "Evolution" in the subject line, so I can keep a record of what people from work send me about Evolution. If Anna sends me a message about anything other than Evolution, 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" virtual folder and in the "Internal Evolution Discussion" virtual folder. To create a virtual folder, select Settings Virtual Folder 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 virtual folders you have previously created. If you have created any virtual folders, 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 Virtual Folder. You can enter a name for your virtual folder 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 Virtual Folder 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