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What's What in 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 Evolution window.

Figure 1-1. The Evolution Main Window

Menubar

The Menubar gives you access to nearly all the features that can be found in 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, 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 Bar

The Search Bar lets you search through your email with precision so you can easily find what you're looking for.

The Shortcut Bar

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:

My Evolution: Start your day here. My Evolution 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 Evolution services.
Inbox: Click the Inbox button to start reading your mail. Your Inbox is also where you can access Evolution's tools to filter, sort, organize, and search your mail.
Calendar: The Calendar can store your appointments and To do 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 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 is the Local folder, which holds all the Evolution data that's stored on your computer. After that are Other Contacts, LDAP contact directories stored on a network, followed by any IMAP mail folders you may have available to you over your network. Lastly, there are Virtual Folders, discussed in the section called Getting Really Organized with Virtual Folders in Chapter 4,

A typical Local folder contains the following folders:

My Evolution, a quick summary to help you do your tasks.
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 Evolution while offline.
Sent, for sent mail.
Trash, a virtual folder view of all the messages you have marked for deletion but not yet expunged. Note that once you have expunged a message, it is permanently deleted.

Navigating without the Folder 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 any serious amount 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
- Mail Storage
- My Evolution
- Tasks
- vTrash
Select the folder for the new folder to go in.

Subfolders

Evolution can also manage subfolders, subfolders are folders inside of folders. This works well if you want to try to separate your home folders from your work folders, or if you like to keep very organized.

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 GNOME, and Evolution is no exception. 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 see it in a new Evolution 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 information arrives in a mail folder, that folder label is displayed in bold text, along with the number of new messages in that folder inside of paranthesis.

The Menu Bar

The menu bar's contents will always provide all the possible actions for any given view of your data. That means that, depending on the context, menu bar items will change. If you're looking at your Inbox, most of the menu items will relate to mail; some will relate to other components of Evolution and some, especially those in the File Menu will relate to the application as a whole. The contents of the menu bar are described in Chapter 11.

File: Anything even 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 Evolution should look. Some of the features control the appearance of 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 Evolution manual.

Once you've familiarized yourself with the main window you can start doing things with it. We'll start with My Evolution, the summary of everything that's going on.