Information is useless unless it's organized and accessible; it's hardly even worth the name if you can't look at it and be informed. The goal of Ximian Evolution is to make the tasks of storing, organizing, and retrieving your personal information easier, so you can work and communicate with others. That is, it's a highly evolved groupware program, an integral part of the Internet-connected desktop. In other words, Ximian Evolution is a tool to help you get your work done. It can help you work in a group by handling email, address and other contact information, and one or more calendars. It can do that on one or several computers, connected directly or over a network, for one person or for large groups. With Ximian Evolution, you can accomplish your most common daily tasks faster. For example, it takes only one or two clicks to enter an appointment or an address card sent to you by email, or to send email to a contact or appointment. Ximian Evolution makes displays faster and more efficient, so searches are faster and memory usage is lower. People who get lots of mail will appreciate advanced features like VFolders, which let you save searches as though they were ordinary mail folders. To start Ximian Evolution, do either of the following: Select Programs Evolution from your menu panel. Type evolution at the command line. Evolution has a number of command-line options that you may wish to make use of. You can find the full list by running the commands man evolution or evolution --help. The most important ones are: To start Evolution in offline mode: evolution --offline To start Evolution and begin composing a message to the email address you name: evolution mailto:joe@somewhere.net To make your web browser use Evolution as the default email client, enter evolution "%s" as the email handler in your web browser or in the GNOME Control Center. The first time you run the program, it will create a directory called evolution in your home directory, where it will store all of its local data. Then, it will open a first-run assistant to help you set up mail accounts and import data from other applications. Using the first-run assistant will take approximately two to five minutes. The Identity window is the first step in the assistant. Here, you will enter some basic personal information. You can define multiple identities later on with the Tools Settings tool and clicking the Mail Accounts button. Full Name: Your full name (Example: John Doe). Email Address: Your email address (Example: john@doe.com) Reply-To: If you want to have replies sent to another email address, enter it here (optional). Organization: The company where you work, or the organization you represent when you send email (optional). The Receiving Email lets you determine which you will get your email. Server Type: There are numerous types of servers from which Ximian Evolution can fetch your mail. Ask your system administrator if you're not sure which of the following are available to you: POP: Downloads your email to your hard disk for permanent storage. Microsoft Exchange: Available only if you have purchased the Ximian Connector for Microsoft Exchange, this will allow you to connect to a Microsoft Exchange 2000 server, which stores email, calendar, and contact information on the server. IMAP: Keeps the email on your server so you can access your email from multiple systems. Standard Unix mbox spool or directory: If you want to read and store mail in the mail spool on your local system, choose this option. You'll need to provide the path to the mail spool you want to use. Maildir format mail directories: If you download your mail using qmail or another maildir-style program, you'll want to use this option. You'll need to provide the path to the mail directory you want to use. MH format mail directories: If you download your mail using mh or another MH-style program, you'll want to use this option. You'll need to provide the path to the mail directory you want to use. Local Delivery: Choose this option if you want to move mail from the spool and store it in your home directory. If you would rather leave mail in your system's spool files, choose the Standard Unix mbox spools option instead. You'll need to provide the path to the mail spool you want to use. None: Select this if you do not plan to check mail with this account. If you selected POP, Microsoft Exchange, or IMAP as your mail server, you'll need to enter some more information: The host name of your mail server. Ask your system administrator if you're not sure. The username for the account on that system. Whether you want to use a secure (SSL) connection. If your server supports it, it's best to enable this security option. The authentication options supported by your server. If you're not sure, click the Check for supported types button or ask your system administrator. Whether you'd like Evolution to remember your password. If you have purchased Ximian Connector for Microsoft Exchange, you can access Microsoft Exchange 2000 servers natively. If you do not have the Connector, or if you use an older version of Microsoft Exchange, talk to your system administrator about access to standard protocol services like POP and IMAP. There are more extensive options for mail preferences, especially if you've chosen POP, Microsoft Exchange, or IMAP as incoming mail server type. If you want to set these options after you've created the account, you can select Tools Configure , click the Mail Accounts button. Then, select the account you want to change and click Edit. See for details. If you chose POP mail: Checking for new mail: If you would like Evolution to check for new mail automatically, check the box and select a frequency in minutes. Message Storage: If you'd like to store copies of your mail on the server, check this option. If you chose Microsoft Exchange: Checking for new mail: If you would like Evolution to check for new mail automatically, check the box and select a frequency in minutes. Global Address List/Active Directory: Enter the name of your global catalog server here. You may also choose to limit the server's responses and select a maximum number of results for an address search. A maximum number of results limits the load on your system and on your network. Mailbox Name: If your active directory user name is different from your Exchange mailbox name, enter the mailbox name here. Outlook Web Access (OWA) Path: In most cases, the URL for web access is "http://server.company.com/exchange." If your system has a path that is not "exchange," enter the appropriate value here. Public Folder Server: Enter the name of your organization's public folder server, if any, here. Apply filters to new messages in Inbox on this server: Check this box to use filters when you visit the Inbox for this account. If you chose IMAP: Checking for new mail: If you would like Evolution to check for new mail automatically, check the box and select a frequency in minutes. If you want Evolution to check for new messages in all your IMAP folders, make sure the Check for new messages in all folders box is selected. Show only subscribed folders: Check this box if you have more folders in your IMAP view than you want to read. Override server-supplied namespace: If you like, enter a specific directory where your server stores mail for you. Typical values are "mail" and "Mail." For more information about how to use IMAP mail, see . Apply filters to new messages in INBOX on this server: If you'd like your filters to work on this account as well as on locally downloaded mail, check this box. For IMAP mail servers, your sysadmin may provide you with a specific namespace, the directory on where your server stores mail for you. If you check your IMAP mail and your folder list includes files that don't look like mail folders, you probably need to change your mail namespace. Typical values are "mail" and "Mail." If you prefer, you can choose to subscribe to individual mail folders one at a time. For more information about how to use IMAP mail, see . The Sending Email step lets you configure sending email. Server Type: There are numerous server types that Ximian Evolution supports for sending your mail. SMTP: Sends mail directly from your system. Microsoft Exchange: Sends mail through a Microsoft Exchange server using the Microsoft Exchange 2000 protocol. Available only if you have are using the Ximian Connector for Microsoft Exchange. You must have a valid license key purchased from store.ximian.com. Sendmail: Uses the Sendmail program to send mail from your system. Sendmail is more flexible, but is not as easy to configure, so you should only select this option if you know how to set up a Sendmail service. If you choose SMTP, there are a few additional items to enter: Host: enter your mail sending server's name or IP address here. Server requires authentication: If your server requires you to enter a password to send mail, check this box. Authentication Type: Unless you've been told otherwise, your best bet is to leave this set at Password. If you're not sure, ask your system administrator or ISP, or have Ximian Evolution check for you by clicking Check for supported types. Username: The account name you use when you login to check your email. Normally, this is the part of your email address before the '@' character. For Exchange servers, it is the username you would use to log in to a Windows workstation at your company. Remember Password: If you prefer to not enter your password every time you check email, press this button. This is a very short section. You can pick two things: the name for the account, and whether it is the default account. The name you choose for the account is used for display within Evolution, and is not sent with any emails. The suggested name is your email address, but you can use other words or phrases, like "Work," "Personal" or "First Account" if you like. If you check the box next to the label Make this my default account, Evolution will assume that you will send messages from this most often, and will set the "From" selector to this account whenever you open a new message. Only one account can be the default. If you have not done so already, you may also be asked to choose a time zone. If Ximian Evolution finds mail or address files from another application, it will offer to import them. If you're not sure which file format your mail program uses, ask your system administrator. If you want, you can skip this step and return to it at a later time by selecting FileImport. Ximian Evolution can import the following types of files: VCard (.vcf, gcrd): The addressbook format used by the GNOME, KDE, and many other contact management applications. You should be able to export to VCard format from any address book application. Microsoft Outlook Express 4 (.mbx): Email file format used by Microsoft Outlook Express 4. For other versions of Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express, see the workaround described in the note below. MBox (mbox): The email box format used by Mozilla, Netscape, Ximian Evolution, Eudora, and many other email clients. Microsoft Outlook, and versions of Outlook Express after version 4, use proprietary formats that Ximian Evolution cannot read or import. For contacts, you may have to email them to yourself and import them that way. For email, there is a simpler workaround: While using Windows, import the files into Mozilla Mail (or another mailer, such as Netscape or Eudora, that uses the standard mbox format). Copy the files to the system or partition you use for Ximian Evolution. Use the Ximian Evolution import tool to import the files. There's more information about why this works, and how, at the Ximian support website. Before importing mail from Netscape, make sure you select FileCompact All Folders. If you don't, Ximian Evolution will import and undelete the messages in your Trash folders. Ximian Evolution uses standard file types for all its information, so you should have no trouble taking your information elsewhere if you want. For mail, that's mbox, for calendar, iCal, and for the address book, vCards in a .db3 database. Chances are, you already have your email in another mail program and don't want to lose the information. The following section describes how to import mail from specific mail clients. mutt is a text-based mail client which is shipped with many Linux and Unix distributions. mutt uses the standard mbox, maildir, and MH file formats, which makes importing your mail into Evolution easy. By default, mutt uses the mbox file format. Open Ximian Evolution Click File Import or press Ctrl I . Click Next. Select Import a Single File Click Browse and select the file you would like to import from. By default, your email is stored in ~/mbox for the mbox format and ~/Maildir for the Maildir format. When prompted for what folder in Evolution to import to, select a folder. You can also create a new folder and drop it in there. KMail is the mail client which is shipped with the KDE desktop environment. KMail uses the standard mbox file format, which means that importing your mail into Evolution is easy. Open Ximian Evolution Click File Import or press Ctrl I . Click Next. Select Import a Single File Click Browse and select the file you would like to import from. By default, KMail stores its information in the Mail directory of your home directory. When prompted for what folder in Evolution to import to, select a folder. You can also create a new folder and drop it in there. Now that you've gotten the first-run configuration out of the way, you're ready to get down to work. Here's a quick explanation of what's going on in your main Ximian Evolution window.

Inbox

Menu Bar The menu bar gives you access to nearly all the features that can be found in Ximian Evolution. Toolbar The Toolbar gives you fast and easy access to the most used features in each component. Shortcut Bar The Shortcut Bar lets you go to your favorite components with the click of a click of a button. Status Bar Periodically, Ximian Evolution will need to quietly display a message, or tell you the progress of a task. This most often happens when you're checking or sending email. These progress queues are shown here, in the Status Bar. Search Tool The Search Tool lets you search through your email with precision so you can easily find what you're looking for. Ximian Evolution's most important job is to give you access to your information and help you use it quickly. One way it does that is through the shortcut bar, the column on the left hand side of the main window. The large buttons with names like Inbox and Contacts are the shortcuts, and you can select different groups of shortcuts by clicking the rectangular group buttons. Take a look at the Shortcut Bar. The shortcut buttons in that category are: Summary: Start your day here. The Ximian Evolution Summary gives you a quick summary of new or important messages, daily appointments and urgent tasks. You can customize its appearance and content, and use it to access Ximian Evolution services. Inbox: Click the Inbox button to start reading your mail. Your Inbox is also where you can access Ximian Evolution's tools to filter, sort, organize, and search your mail. Calendar: The Calendar can store your appointments and task lists for you. Connected to a network, you can use it to keep a group of people on schedule and up to date. Tasks: A full-size view of your calendar's task pad. Contacts: The Addressbook holds contacts, with address, phone, and other personal information. Like calendar information, contact data can be synchronized with hand-held devices and shared over a network. The folder bar is a more comprehensive way to view the information you've stored with Ximian Evolution. It displays all your appointments, address cards, and email in a tree that's a lot like a file tree-- it starts small at the top, and branches downward. On most computers, there will be three or four folders at the base. First, of course, is the Summary, a customizable summary of your information. Below that are your Local Folders, which hold all the Ximian Evolution data that's stored on your computer. After that are your network servers: LDAP servers that host shared contact directories, and IMAP mail folders to which you subscribe. Lastly, there are vFolders, or virtual folders, discussed in ,

Inbox with Folder Bar

A typical Local folder contains the following folders: Calendar, for appointments and event listings. Contacts, for address cards. Drafts, for messages you started and didn't finish. Inbox, for incoming mail. Outbox, for messages you have written but not yet sent. This will be empty unless you use Ximian Evolution while offline. Sent, for sent mail. Tasks, for your task list. Portions of your task list are reflected in the calendar, as well as in the summary folder. Trash, a vFolder view of all the messages you have marked for deletion but not yet expunged. You don't need the folder bar or the shortcut bar to move around the main window. You can use the Tab key to switch from one part of the window to another. When you hide the folder bar, there is a menu on the left side of the window just below the toolbar to move about the folder tree, even with the folder and shortcut bars hidden. If you get large volumes of mail, you'll want more folders than just your Inbox. To create a new folder: Select File New Folder or press the keyboard shortcut Shift Ctrl E . Select the name of the folder in the Folder Name field. Select the folder type. The available options are. Calendar Contacts Mail Tasks Choose the location of the new folder. Ximian Evolution lets you nest folders inside of each other, so that you can have a detailed organizational system. Calendars must go in calendar folders, mail in mail folders, and contacts in contact folders. Right-clicking will bring up a menu for just about anything in Ximian Evolution. If you right-click on a folder, you'll have a menu with the following options: View, to view the folder. Open in New Window to view the folder in another window. Move, to move the folder to another location. Copy, to duplicate the folder. Delete, to delete the folder and all its contents. Rename, to change its name. Create New Folder, to create another folder in the same location. Add to Shortcut Bar, to add the folder to your shortcut bar. Properties, to view or change the folder properties. You can also rearrange folders and messages by dragging and dropping them. Any time new mail arrives in a mail folder, that folder label is displayed in bold text, along with the number of new messages in that folder. The menu bar's contents will always provide all the possible actions for any given view of your data. If you're looking at your Inbox, most of the menu items will relate to mail; some will relate to other components of Ximian Evolution and some, especially those in the File Menu will relate to the application as a whole. File: Anything related to a file or to the operations of the application generally falls under this menu: creating things, saving them to disk, printing them, and quitting the program itself. Edit: The Edit menu holds useful tools that help you edit text and move it around. View: This menu lets you decide how Ximian Evolution should look. Some of the features control the appearance of Ximian Evolution as a whole, and others the way a particular kind of information appears. Actions: Holds actions which maybe applied to a message. Normally, if there is only one target for the action -- for example, replying to a message -- you can find it in the Actions menu. Tools: Tools for configuring, changing, and setting up go here. For mail, that means things like and the Virtual Folder Editor. For the Calendar and the Contact Manager, it's color, network, and layout configuration. Search: Select menu items here to search for messages, or for phrases within a message. You can also see previous searches you have made. In addition to the Search menu, there is a text entry box in the toolbar that you can use to search for messages. Help: Select among these items to open the Help Browser and read the Ximian Evolution manual. Once you've familiarized yourself with the main window you can start doing things with it. We'll start with the Summary, which provides a quick overview of your Ximian Evolution information. The Ximian Evolution Summary provides you with a quick run-down of important information: your appointments for a given day, how much new mail you have, headlines from selected news services, and so forth. To see the Summary, click on the Summary button in the shortcut bar, or select the Summary folder in the folder bar.

The Evolution Summary gives you a quick view of your day

Weather Summary Shows you the latest weather updates from hundreds of cities around the world. News Feeds Displays up to the minute news from your favorite websites. Mail Summary Shows you how many email messages you have in your selected folders, waiting to be read. Calendar Summary Shows you your calendar. Tasks are displayed below calendar appointments. To add additional services to your Summary, or to edit the existing services, select Tools Configure and click the Summary Settings button. Ximian Evolution email is like other email programs in several ways: 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 makes it easy to send and receive multiple file attachments. It supports multiple mail sources, including IMAP, POP3, and local mbox or mh spools and files created by other mail programs. It lets you guard your privacy with encryption. However, Ximian Evolution has some important differences. First, it's built to handle very large amounts of mail. Both the filtering and searching functions were built for speed and efficiency on large volumes of mail. There's also the Ximian Evolution vFolder, an advanced organizational feature not found in mainstream 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. Here's what the mailer looks like:

Inbox

Message List The Message List displays all the emails that you have. This includes all your read, unread, and email that is flagged to be deleted. Email Viewer This is where your email is displayed. 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: you can move, delete, or undelete them, and create filters or vFolders based on them. Most of the mail-related actions you'll want to perform are listed in the Actions menu in the menu bar. The most frequently used ones, like Reply and Forward, also appear as buttons in the toolbar. Almost all of them are also located 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. For an in-depth guide to the email capabilities of Ximian Evolution, read . To begin using the calendar, select Calendar from the shortcut bar. By default, the calendar starts showing today's schedule on a ruled background. At the upper right, there's a monthly calendar you can use to switch days. Below that, there's a Task pad, where you can keep a list of tasks separate from your calendar appointments. The day view in the calendar looks like this:

Ximian Evolution Contact Manager Window

Appointment List The Appointment List is responsible for showing you all of your scheduled appointments, whether they are all day appointments or simply one time appointments that last a half an hour. Task List The Task List compliments the Appointment List as it keeps track of tasks which don't have a time associated with them. Tasks can have complex notes associated with them, and you can also note their completeness on a percentage scale. To display more information about your notes, drag the column border to the left. Month Pane The month pane is a small view of your calendar by month. To display more months here, drag the column border to the left. If you select a range of days in the month pane they will be displayed Appointment List. For more information about the calendar read . The Ximian Evolution address book can handle all of the functions of an address book, phone book, or Rolodex. Of course, it's a lot easier to update Ximian Evolution than it is to change an actual paper book. Ximian Evolution also allows easy synchronization with hand-held devices and functions with LDAP directories on a network. Another advantage of the Ximian Evolution address book is its integration with the rest of the application. For example, you can create an address card from an email just by right-clicking on the sender's email address. To open your address book, click on Contacts in the shortcut bar, or select one of your contacts folders from the folder bar. shows the address book in all its organizational glory. By default, the address book shows all your cards in alphabetical order, in a minicard view. You can select other views from the View menu, and adjust the width of the columns by clicking and dragging the gray column dividers. The address book looks like this:

Ximian Evolution Contact List Window

Contact List The Contact List lists your contact cards. You can also search through the cards in the same way that you search email folders, with the search bar just above the contact list. Alphanumeric Shortcuts Click one of the buttons along the right side of the window to view contacts that begin with the letter or number you click. For detailed instructions on how to use the address book, read .