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 files, and even NNTP data (newsgroups), which isn'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

Other actions you can perform are listed, appropriately, in the Actions menu in the menu bar: Mark all Messages Read Evolution keeps track of which messages you have read, and which ones you haven't: When you've looked at a message for more than a few seconds, it's no longer marked as new. If you want to mark all mail in a folder as read, select this item. View Message View Message opens the selected message in its own window. Edit Message Only available for messages you have written (drafts and mail in the Outbox, this item opens the message in a new mail composition window. Expunge Clicking the Delete button marks messages for deleteion. Expunge wipes them off the face of the earth. You can also select the order in which messages appear in that list. 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. Aside from sorting the messages, you can opt to have the messages threaded. Select View Threaded Message List to turn the threaded view on or off. If the option selected, Evolution will attempt to associate related messages by using 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. To delete a message, 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 Actions 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. Before you get it, though, you should decide where you want to keep it. Your options will vary a little depending on your network setup, but they come down to storing the mail on your hard disk (using POP), or storing it on the network (using IMAP). If you store your mail on your local hard disk, you can read it whether you're online or not, but you can only read it from one computer. If you store it on the network, you can only read it when you're online, but you can access it from almost any computer with a network connection, even if it doesn't have Evolution. If you choose POP, you'll be putting mail in the Inbox in the Local folder. If you choose IMAP, it's the Inbox of a folder with the same name as your mail server. That's so you can maintain several distinct IMAP servers if you want. See for more information about mail servers. Regardless of where you keep your mail, you can click Get mail in the toolbar to check your mail. The first time you do that, the mail setup assistant will ask you for the information it needs to check your mail (see for more information). If you're checking mail over a network (instead of from local mbox files), you'll need to enter your email password. Type it in, click OK and Evolution will download your mail. New mail will appear in your Inbox. Once you've entered your password, Evolution will hold it in memory so that you don't have to retype it every time you want to check mail. It will only remember the password until you quit the application; each time you run Evolution, you need to re-enter your password. If you'd like Evolution to forget your password sooner, select ActionsForget Passwords, and it will do so immediately. 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 exactly like an IMAP folder, except that you can't delete messages from it. When you click Get Mail, Evolution will also check for news messages. If you prefer to use a different program, there's always Pan. If someone sends you a file attached to an email (an "attachment"), Evolution will display the file at the bottom of the message to which it's attached. Text, HTML, and most images will be displayed in 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. 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. It may even be too easy, which is why I like to queue my messages up to be sent a few minutes later. 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. 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 . To learn more about how you can specify message queue and filter behavior, see . 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 . 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. 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 of email addresses. Click the check-boxes next to the addresses, then click OK, and the address will be added to the appropriate form field. For more information about using email together with the contact manager and the calendar, see and . 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 To: field is for the primary recipients of the message you are going to send. The simplest way to direct a message is to put the email address or addresses in the To: field, to denote primary recipients. However, it is 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! In order to reply to a message, click on it once in the message list to select it. Then press the Reply button. A window like the New Message window will appear, but the subject will already be present— the same subject as the message to which you are replying, but with Re: before it, to mark it as a reply. In addition, the full text of the previous message is inserted into the new message, either in italics (for HTML display) or with the > character (in plain text mode) before each line. This indicates quoting. You can intersperse your message with the quoted material as shown in

Evolution Main Window

If a message has several recipients, as in the case of mailing lists or messages that have been carbon copied, you may wish to click 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: it 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, 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. 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 clickin 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. 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 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 whether to display all your filters, only those filters which are performed on incoming mail, or only filters for 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 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 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 Name field, and then begin choosing criteria. Choose how many criteria you'd like by pressing More and Fewer. You can choose from five types of criteria, and you can have as many as you like; at least, I've never found a maximum. If you have multiple criteria, you'll want to decide between Match all parts, which will make the filter affect only those messages which meet all the criteria you're about to describe, and Match any part, which will make the filter affect any message that meets even one of the criteria. 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. Message Body The message body. Expression Enter a regular expression, and Evolution will match it for you. Then choose a rule for matching: Contains If the part of the message examined contains the text you enter, the filter will perform its selected action. Does not contain If the part of the message examined does not contain the text you enter, the filter will perform its selected action. Then, enter the text you want the filter to find, and you're done telling Evolution what sort of messages you want it to filter. Now, tell it what to do with those messages. If you want multiple actions, click More; if you want fewer, click Fewer. 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. 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 VFolder Editor from the Tools menu in the main window. This will bring up a dialog box that looks suspiciously like the Filter Assistant (for more information on filters, see ), and which presents you with a list of vFolders you have previously created. If you have already created vFolders, you can click on them in the frame labelled Select Rule Type, and edit or remove them. 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 text it is that you want to find. 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