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 permits multiple 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 volumes of mail. There's also the Evolution Virtual Folder, an advanced organizational feature not found in many 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 this feature especially useful. You can start reading email by clicking Inbox in the shortcut bar. The first time you use Evolution, it will start with the Inbox open and show you a message from Ximian welcoming you to the application. Your Evolution Inbox will look something like the one in . Just below the toolbar is the message list, showing message header information like Subject and Date. The message itself appears below that, in the view pane. If you find the view pane too small, you can resize the pane, enlarge the whole window, or double-click on the message in the message list to have it open in a new window. To change the sizes of a pane, just click and hold on the divider between the two panes. Then you can drag up and down to select the size of the panes. 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. To look at the entire source of your email message, including all the header information, select ViewSource 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. The direction of the arrow next to the label indicates the direction of the sort, and if you click again, you'll sort them in reverse order. For example, click once on Date to sort messages by date from oldest to newest. Click again, and Evolution sorts the list from newest to oldest. 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. When you select this option, Evolution groups the replies to a message with the original, so you can follow the thread of a conversation from one message to the next. 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. Or, right-click on a message and choose Delete from the right-click menu. The message will appear with a line through it, to show that you've marked it for deletion. If you change your mind and decide you want to keep it, select Message Undelete. If you really want to get rid of it, choose Expunge from the Folder menu. That will delete it permanently. 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 your password until 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 have chosen to use IMAP, and you have multiple folders on your IMAP server, you may need to subscribe to them. To learn how to use the subscription manager, read . 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 that 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 show an icon at the end of the message. Right-click on the icon to get a list of options which will vary depending on the type of attachment. You will have the option to display most files as part of the message, export them to a different application (images to Eye of GNOME, spreadsheets to Gnumeric, and so forth), or save them to disk. 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 Message, 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. Evolution will send mail immediately unless you tell it to do otherwise by selecting File Send Later. This will add your 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. Many times, one might want to use "Send Later" becuase it gives you a chance to change your mind about a message before it is sent. This way, you may not say something you may regret. 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 hide the display of files you've attached to the message, select View Hide Attachments ; to show them again, choose 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. When recieving a message that has an attached image, Evolution gives you the choice whether to view it or not. You can choose to have it always shown, load images only if the sender is in your addressbook, or never load images. Evolution, like most email programs 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. To send mail to more than one or two people, you can use the 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. 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. However, but putting his "Clients" addressbook into the Bcc: section, that will cause them to be hidden from the competition. It seems insignificant, but it can make a huge difference in some situations. If you have created address cards in the contact manager, you can also enter nicknames or other portions of address data, and Evolution will transparently 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 the 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 before each line (in plain text mode), 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. 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 for all of them to read, he uses Reply to All, but if he just wants to tell Susan that he agrees with her, he uses Reply. Note that his reply will not reach anyone that Susan put on her Bcc list, since that list is not shared with anyone. 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 Find a regex, also called a regular expression, in your composer window. 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 menu items, you can choose whether or not to Search Backwards in the document from the point where your cursor is. For all but the regular expression search (which doesn't need it), you are offered a check box to determine whether the search is to be Case Sensitive when it determines a match. Normally, you can't set text styles or insert 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 newer email programs can display images and text styles as well as basic alignment and paragraph formatting. They do this with HTML, just like web pages 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 in the toolbar just above the space where you'll actually compose the message, and they also appear in the Insert and Format menus. 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 At the left edge of the toolbar, you can choose Normal for a default text style or Header 1 through Header 6 for varying sizes of header from large (1) to tiny (6). Other styles include pre, to use the HTML tag for preformatted blocks of text, and three types of List Item for the highly organized. 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 aligned to the left, the center button, centered, and the right hand button, aligned on the right side. 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. The colored box displays the current text color; to choose a new one, click the arrow button just to the right. 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). If you don't want special link text, you can just enter the address directly, and Evolution will recognize it as a link. 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. This is different from attaching them to a message, but not very different. 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 in-line 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 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. 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, 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

Evolution lets you handle your IMAP and newsgroup subscriptions with the same tool: the subscriptions manager. To start using it, choose Settings Manage Subscriptions . If you have configured any IMAP (mail) or NNTP (news) servers, you will see them listed in the left half of the subscription management window. Click on a server to select it, and you will see the folders or newsgroups available to you. You can then select individual folders and subscribe to them, or remove yourself from the subscription list. Once you have subscribed to a folder or newsgroup, your system will check for new messages whenever you press the Get Mail button.