A User's Guide to Ximian Evolution
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# What's What in Ximian Evolution

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.

Figure 1-1. The Ximian Evolution Main Window

Menubar

The Menubar 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.

## The Shortcut Bar

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.

## Folders and The Folder Bar

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 downwards. 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 the Section called Getting Really Organized with vFolders in Chapter 4,

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.

- Trash, a vFolder view of all the messages you have marked for deletion but not yet expunged.

> Navigating without the Folder Bar or the Shortcut Bar: 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:

1. Select File->New->Folder Shift+Ctrl+E.

2. Select the name of the folder in the Folder Name field.

3. Select the folder type. The available options are.

   - Calendar

   - Contacts

   - Mail

   - Tasks

4. Choose the location of the new folder.

### Subfolders

Ximian Evolution lets you nest folders inside of each other, so that you can have a detailed organizational system.

> Folders Have Limits: 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

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.

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.

## Introducing the Summary

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.

Figure 1-2. The Evolution Summary

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

Shows your pending tasks

To add additional services to your Summary, or to edit the existing services, select Tools->Configure and click the Summary Settings button.

## Introducing Email

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:

Figure 1-3. Ximian Evolution Mail

Email Viewer

This is where your email is displayed.

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.

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 Message 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 Chapter 3.

## Introducing the Calendar

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:

Figure 1-4. Ximian Evolution Calendar View

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.

Calendar Window

The Calendar Window has a graphical representation of the calendar, so you can select what days to view in the Appointment List.

For more information about the calendar read Chapter 6.

## Introducing the Address Book

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. Figure 1-5 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:

Figure 1-5. Ximian Evolution Contact Interface

Contact List

The Contact List lists your contacts.

For detailed instructions on how to use the address book, read Chapter 5.

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