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 Novell 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. Novell Evolution 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 Novell Evolution, you can accomplish your most common daily tasks faster. For example, it takes only one or two clicks to enter appointment or contact information sent to you by email, or to send email to a contact or appointment. Novell 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 Novell 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 start Evolution in mail mode, type evolution -c mail. To open the calendar first, use -c calendar. To open the contact list first, use -c contacts. If Evolution stops responding, freezes, or hangs, open a terminal and type evolution --force-shutdown to force every piece of the application to quit. 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. Later on, if you want to change this account, or if you want to create a new one, select Tools Settings and click the Mail Accounts button. Then, select the account you want to change and click Edit. Alternately, add a new account by clicking Add. See for details. 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. Account Information: Choose a name for Evolution to refer to this account. This is used only for display within Evolution. Good choices are "Work Email" or "IMAP Server." Full Name: Your full name. Email Address : Your email address. Make this my default account: Select this as the primary account. Reply-To : If you want to have replies sent to another email address, enter it in this space (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 Novell Evolution can fetch your mail. Ask your system administrator if you're not sure which of the following are available to you: GroupWise: Select this option if you use a GroupWise server. GroupWise keeps mail, calendar, and contact information on the server. Microsoft Exchange: Available only if you have installed the Novell Connector for Microsoft Exchange, this will allow you to connect to a Microsoft Exchange 2000 or 2003 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. POP: Downloads your email to your hard disk for permanent storage. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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, ask your system administrator. You can also click the Check for supported types button; when you have done so, the menu will limit itself to options your server has not refused to support. Note that some servers do not announce the authentication mechanisms they support, so clicking this button is not an absolute guarantee that available mechanisms will actually work. Choose whether you'd like Evolution to remember your password. If you have selected this item, you can force Evolution to ask for a password again by selecting ActionsForget Passwords, or by returning to this section of the accounts tool, which you can find by selecting ToolsSettings If you have installed Novell 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. Once you have selected a mail delivery mechanism, you may set some preferences for its behavior: 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. 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," but some systems use a different path. Public Folder Server: Enter the name of your organization's public folder server, if any. 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: Automatically check for new mail every... minutes: If you would like Evolution to check for new mail automatically, check the box and select a frequency in minutes. Check for new messages in all folders: If you want Evolution to check for new messages in all your IMAP folders, make sure this box is selected. This option is normally selected in combination with server-side filtering tools like procmail. Use custom command to connect to server: Some IMAP servers require a specific, custom connection sequence. Custom commands are rare; if your server requires one, your system administrator should be able to tell you. Show only subscribed folders: Check this box if you have more folders in your IMAP view than you want to read. For more information about IMAP mail and folder subscriptions, see . Override server-supplied namespace: If you like, enter a specific directory where your server stores mail for you. The most common values are "mail" and "Mail." 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. Check new messages for Junk contents: Check this box if you want your IMAP email filtered for junk mail. Only check for Junk messages in the INBOX folder: If you have new messages arriving in multiple folders, as you would with server-side filters, Evolution may filter them for junk mail as well. This can take extra time, so if you know that those messages are not likely to be junk mail, select this option. Automatically synchronize remote mail locally: Select this option to have Evolution cache mail locally for offline use. For IMAP mail servers, your system administrator may provide you with a specific namespace, the directory 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 . Now that you have entered information about how you plan to get mail, Evolution needs to know about how you want to send it: Server Type: There are numerous server types that Novell Evolution supports for sending your mail. SMTP: Sends mail using an outbound mail server. This is the most common choice for sending mail. Microsoft Exchange: Sends mail through a Microsoft Exchange server using the Microsoft Exchange 2000 protocol. Available only if you have are using the Novell Connector for Microsoft Exchange, which is installed separately. Groupwise: Sends mail through your GroupWise server. 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. 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 Novell 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. In this step, you will set a few miscellaneous options: Drafts Folder: When you save a message as a draft, it will be saved to this folder. Sent Messages Folder: A copy of every message you send will be saved in this folder. Always carbon-copy (cc) to: Send a carbon copy of every message to this address. Always blind carbon-copy (bcc) to: Send a blind carbon copy of every message to this address. If you have not done so already, you may also be asked to choose a time zone. If Novell Evolution finds mail or address files from another application, it will offer to import them. For a full description of the import feature, see . Microsoft Outlook, and versions of Outlook Express after version 4, use proprietary formats that Novell Evolution cannot read or import. To import information, you may wish to use the Outport tool under Windows. See the instructions in . Before importing mail from Netscape, make sure you have selected FileCompact All Folders. If you don't, Novell Evolution will import and undelete the messages in your Trash folders. Evolution uses standard file types for mail and calendar information, so you can copy those files from your ~/.evolution directory. The file formats used are mbox for mail and iCal for calendar information. Contacts files are stored in a database, but can be saved as a standard VCard. To export contact data, open your contacts tool and select the contacts you wish to export (press Ctrl A to select them all). Then, select FileSave as VCard. 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 Novell Evolution window.

Inbox

Menu Bar The menu bar gives you access to nearly all the features that can be found in Novell 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 switch between folders and between Evolution tools. At the bottom of the shortcut bar there are buttons that let you switch tools, and above that, all the available folders for the current tool. If you have the Evolution Connector for Microsoft Exchange installed, you will have an Exchange button in addition to buttons for the other tools. Status Bar Periodically, Novell 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. The Online/Offline indicator is here, too, in the lower left of the window. Search Tool The Search Tool lets you search through your email with precision so you can easily find what you're looking for. Novell 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 buttons with names like Mail and Contacts are the shortcuts. Above them is a list of folders for the current Evolution tool. The folder list organizes your mail, calendars, contact lists, and task lists in a tree, similar to a file tree. Most people will find one to four folders at the base of the tree, depending on the tool and their system configuration. Each Evolution tool will have at least one, called On This Computer, for local information. For example, the folder list for the email tool will show any remote mail storage you have set up, plus local folders and vFolders, or virtual folders, discussed in . If you get large volumes of mail, you'll want more folders than just your Inbox; you can also create multiple calendar, task, or contacts folders. To create a new folder: Right click on the list of folders, and select New Folder. Enter the name of the folder in the Folder Name field. Choose the location of the new folder. Right-clicking will bring up a menu for just about anything in Novell Evolution. If you right-click on a folder or subfolder, you'll have a menu with the following options: Copy, to copy the folder to another place. When you select this item, Evolution offers a choice of locations to copy to. Move, to move the folder to another location. Delete, to delete the folder and all its contents. New Folder, to create another folder in the same location. Rename, to change the name of the folder. Delete, to delete the folder. Properties, to check the number of total and unread messages in a folder, and, for remote folders, decide whether to copy the folder to your local system for offline operation. 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 Novell 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 Novell Evolution should look. Some of the features control the appearance of Novell 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, such as replying to a message, you can find it in the Actions menu. Tools: For all components of Evolution, you can access the settings and configuration options in the tools menu. You can also find things like filter settings and the Virtual Folder editor. 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 Novell Evolution manual. Novell 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, Novell Evolution has some important differences. First, it's built to handle very large amounts of mail. The junk mail, message filtering and searching functions were built for speed and efficiency on large volumes of mail. There's also the 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.

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 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 it 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, including moving or deleting them, creating filters or vFolders based on them, and marking them as junk mail. 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 Novell Evolution, read . To begin using the calendar, click the Calendar button in 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.

Novell Evolution Contact Manager Window

Appointment List The appointment list displays all your scheduled appointments. Task List Tasks are distinct from appointments in that they generally don't have times associated with them. You can see a larger view of your task list by clicking the Tasks button in the shortcut bar. Month Pane The month pane is a small view of a calendar month. To display additional months, drag the column border to the left. You can also select a range of days in the month pane to get a custom range of days displayed in the appointment list. For more information about the calendar read . The Novell Evolution contacts tool can handle all of the functions of an address book, phone book, or Rolodex. Of course, it's a lot easier to update Evolution than it is to change an actual paper book, in part because Evolution can synchronize with PalmOS devices and use LDAP directories on a network. Another advantage of the Novell Evolution contacts tool is its integration with the rest of the application. For example, you can right-click on an email address in Evolution mail to create a contact entry instantly. To use the contacts tool, click the Contacts button in the shortcut bar. shows the address book in all its organizational glory. By default, the display shows all your contacts 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 contacts tool looks like this:

Novell Evolution Contact List Window

Contact List The largest section of the contacts display shows a list of individual contacts. You can also search through the contacts in the same way that you search email folders, with the search tool on the right side of the toolbar. For detailed instructions on how to use the address book, read .