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.
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 Tools
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 Contact Manager holds your addresses, phone numbers, and contact 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 Tab 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 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.
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 preferences go here. For mail, that means things like Mail Configuration 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.
FIXME: Insert picture of the Summary and labels here.
To add additional services to your Summary, or to edit the existing services, select Tools->Summary Settings.
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 recieve multiple file attachments.
It supports multiple mail sources, including IMAP, POP3, local mbox and mh files.
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:
Email
Viewer
This is where your email is displayed.
Email List
The Email 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.
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:
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. Since Ximian Evolution supports the LDAP directory protocol, you can use it with almost any type of existing directory server on your 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 1-4 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 grey column dividers.
The address book looks like this:
Contact
List
The Contact List lists your contacts.
For detailed instructions on how to use the address book, read Chapter 5.