A User's Guide to Ximian Evolution
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# Chapter 10. Advanced Configuration

Perhaps your mail server has changed names. Perhaps you've grown tired of a certain layout for your appointments. Whatever the reason, you want to change your Evolution settings. This chapter will tell you how to do just that.

Evolution 1.2 brings with it a redesigned comprehensive settings window that you can open by choosing Tools->Configure, no matter where you are in Evolution. On the left half of the settings window is a column, similar to the Evolution shortcut bar, which lets you choose which portion of Evolution to customize. The right half of the window is where you'll make your actual changes.

Figure 10-1. Changing Mail Settings

There are eight items you can customize. From top to bottom, they are:

Mail Accounts

  Here, add or change information about your email accounts: the servers to which you connect, the way you download mail, your password authentication mode, and so forth. This is the most complex item in the list, and is covered in the Section called Working with Mail Accounts.

Folder Settings

  Here, you can choose the default folders for various components of Evolution, the folders that will be cached locally when you go to offline mode, and the folders that Evolution will use when it is searching for autocompletion information as you address a mail.

Mail Preferences

  These are overall mail reading preferences: display settings, notification options, security, and so forth. These are covered in the Section called Mail Display Options.

Composer Preferences

  Settings for the way that you use the mail composer: shortcuts, signatures, spelling, and so forth. One fun feature here is the ability to substitute graphical smiley-faces for "emoticons" such as :) that many people use in email. This tool is covered in the Section called Message Composer Preferences.

Calendar and Tasks

  Here, you can set the way the calendar behaves, including your time zone and the length of your work-week.

Directory Servers

  If you want to use a shared directory server (LDAP server), this is the place to set it up.

Font Preferences

  Choose the fonts that Evolution will use to display email here. You can choose fonts for the mail composer by selecting Edit->Properties from within the composer window.

Summary Preferences

  Set the mail folders, news feeds, schedule summary length, and weather locations to be displayed here. For news feeds, enter the web address of any RDF file.

# Mail Settings

The first few tools, with the exception of the folder tool, cover mail tasks:

## Working with Mail Accounts

Ximian Evolution allows you to maintain multiple accounts, or identities. This is useful want to keep personal and professional email separate, or if you wear several hats at work. When you are writing an email message, you can which account to use by selecting from the drop-down list next to the From entry in the message composer.

Clicking Get Mail will refresh any IMAP, `mh`, or `mbox` listings and check and download mail from all POP servers. In other words, Get Mail gets your mail, no matter how many sources you have, or what types they are. If you don't want to check mail for a given account, select it in the Accounts tab and click the Disable button.

To add a new account, simply click Add to open the mail configuration assistant. To alter an existing identity, select it in the Preferences window, and then click Edit to open the account editor dialog.

The account editor dialog has six sections:

Identity:

  Here, enter the name, email address, and other identifying information for the account.

Receiving Mail

  Here, select the way you will be getting mail: you may download mail from a server (POP), read and keep it on the server (Microsoft Exchange or IMAP), or read it from files that already exist on your desktop computer. If you use a server, it may permit or require you to use a Secure Socket Layer (SSL) connection. To turn SSL connections on, just click the Use Secure Connection (SSL) button.

  > Specifying Port Numbers: Your system administrator may ask you to connect to a specific port on a mail server. To specify which port you use, just type a colon and the port number after the server name. For example, to connect to port 143 on the server smtp.omniport.com, you would enter as `smtp.omniport.com:143` as the server name.

Receiving Options

  Here, decide whether you'd like to check for mail automatically and how often, as well as other message retrieval options.

  If you chose POP:

    - 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.

    - Store Store status headers in Elm/Pine/Mutt format: If you would like to use the X-Status header format used by the mail clients Elm, Pine, and Mutt, select this option. This option is useful if you plan to check your mail with those clients from time to time.

  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.

    - Exchange Server: If your active directory user name is different from your Exchange mail user name, check this box and enter your mail username here.

    - Create a Global Address List folder: If you would like to have a seperate folder for the Active Directory's Global Address List, leave this box checked.

    - Active Directory Server Name: In most organizations, the Active Directory server will be different from the Exchange mail server. If so, check the box and enter the Active Directory server name here.

    - Limit number of Responses: 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.

  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 the Section called Subscription Management in Chapter 3.

    - 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.

    - Store Store status headers in Elm/Pine/Mutt format: If you would like to use the X-Status header format used by the mail clients Elm, Pine, and Mutt, select this option. This option is useful if you plan to check your mail with those clients from time to time.

Sending Mail

  In this section, you will choose and configure a method for sending mail. You may choose SMTP, Microsoft Exchange (if you have purchased the Ximian Connector for Microsoft Exchange) or sendmail.

Special Folders

  Here, you can decide where this account will store the messages that it has sent, and the messages that you save as drafts.

Security

  In this section, you will set the security options for this account. Enter your PGP Key ID and decide how frequently to encrypt and sign your messages. You can learn more about PGP and encryption in the Section called Encryption in Chapter 3.

## Mail Display Options

In this tab you can decide how you would like Ximian Evolution to display your mail: how to display citations, how long to wait before marking a message as read, and so forth.

This is also where you can decide how you would like Ximian Evolution to handle inline images in HTML mail that you get. There is a detailed discussion of the issues surrounding these options in the Section called Inline Images in HTML Mail in Chapter 3.

To change the font which Ximian Evolution uses to display mail, do the following:

1. Open the Control Center by selecting System->Settings from the menu panel.

2. Select the HTML Viewer settings tool.

3. Choose the font and font size you would like to use.

Alternately, open a terminal and run the gtkhtml-properties-capplet command. This will open the GNOME HTML Display Properties tool, and you can select a font and other attributes of your HTML display, including that in Ximian Evolution.

## Message Composer Preferences

There are three whole tabs of settings you can change for the message composer. The General tab covers shortcuts and assorted behavior, and the other two control signatures and spell checking. In the General tab, you can set:

Shortcuts Type

  Choose a keyboard shortcut scheme: do you prefer keyboard shortcuts similar to those of Microsoft Windows, XEmacs, or Emacs?

Default Behavior

  Choose how you will normally forward and reply messages, what character set they will use, whether they will be in HTML, and whether that HTML can contain smiley face images.

Alerts

  There are two optional alerts here:

  Prompt when sending messages with an empty subject

    The composer will warn you if you try to send a message without a subject.

  Prompt when sending messages with only Bcc recipients defined

    The composer will warn you if you try to send a message that has only Bcc recipients. This is important because some mail servers will fail to honor blind carbon copy if you do not have at least one recipient that is visible to all readers.

The signature editor is new for Evolution 1.2. It allows you to create several different signatures in plain text or in HTML, and to specify which of them will be added to emails you create in the message composer. If you prefer to use an alternate signature or none at all, you can select it from the mail composer itself.

In the spell-checking tool, you can set spelling options, including the language or languages you will use. Note that you must install the gnome-spell package, available through Red Carpet, for spell-checking to be available in Evolution. Alternate dictionaries are aslo available through Red Carpet and are detected automatically if you have installed them.

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