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. To change your mail settings, first go to your Inbox. Then select Mail Settings from the Tools menu. This will open the mail preferences window, illustrated in . Mail Preferences are separated into several categories: Identity This allows you to set your name, email address, and other information. The default values are the ones found on your system account. Sources Set your mail-checking protocols and servers here. Sources Set your mail-checking protocols and servers here. News Servers Specify your News Server preferences here.

Setting mail preferences

If you have only one email address, or use automatic forwarding to funnel multiple addresses to one account, then you will only need to configure one identity. You may, however, want more that one. To alter an identity, click on it in the Identity tab of the Preferences window, and then click Edit. To add a new identity, simply click Add. In either case, you'll be presented with a dialog box with four fields: Full Name: by default, this is the same name as the full name described in your user account on your computer. You can select another if you wish. Email address: Enter your email address in this space. Organization: If you send email as a representative of a company or other organization, enter its name here. Signature file: You may choose a small text file to be appended to every message that you send. Typically, signature files include address or other contact information, or a favorite quotation. They should not be more than three lines long. In order to send mail with Evolution, you need to connect to your network. To do that, you'll need to know your user name and password, what sort of mail sending and receiving protocols your network uses, and the names of the servers you'll be using. If you're switching from another groupware or email program, you can almost certainly use the same settings as you did with that program. Select the Sources tab in the Preferences window to tell Evolution where you want to get your mail, and click Transports to determine how you want to send your mail. The Mail Sources tab allows you to edit, add, or delete methods of retrieving mail from servers. Clicking on Add or Edit will bring up a dialog box to offer you the following options: Mail source type: Select from IMAP, POP or Unix-style mbox files. Server: Enter the name of your mail server in this field. For example: mail.mycompany.com Username: Enter your user name here. Eva Lucianne Tester's user name is eltester. Authentication: Your system administrator will know which type of authentication your system requires. Evolution can also detect what sorts of authentication are available once it knows where to find the server. Test values before continuing If this box is checked, Evolution will attempt to make sure that all the other entries in the dialog window are correct. If you choose several mail sources, clicking Get Mail will refresh any IMAP or mbox listings and check and download all POP servers. In other words, Get Mail gets your mail, no matter how many sources you have, or what types they are. The Transports tab lets you set how you will send mail. Evolution currently supports two mail transport options: SMTP, which uses a remote mail server, and sendmail, which uses the sendmail program on your local system. Sendmail is more difficult to configure, but offers more flexibility than SMTP. To use SMTP, you'll need to enter the name of your SMTP server, which should look like: smtp.isp.net. Evolution can attempt to determine if you have entered a valid server name. To have it do so, check the box labelled Test these values before continuing before you click OK. Newsgroups are so much like mailing lists that there's no reason not to have access to them right next to your mail. When you first select the News Servers tab, you will see a blank box with three familiar buttons on the right: Add, Edit, and Delete. Click Add to add a news server; you will be prompted for its name. Enter the name, click OK, and you're done. You can have as many mail servers as you like, of course. News servers will appear next to your IMAP servers. Not everything fits neatly into categories. This tab contains some miscellaneous configurations that don't have too much to do with each other. Send messages in HTML format If you check this box, you will send messages as HTML by default. If you leave it unchecked, your messages will be sent without HTML formatting unless you select Format HTML in the message composer. See for more information about HTML mail. Folder Format By default, Evolution saves its mail in the mbox format. You can switch to the mh format if you like. Note that this is an advanced feature and may cause you to lose some messages, so you should probably make a backup of your evolution directory first. In addition, it will take quite some time if you have a large mailbox. To set the behavior of your Contact Manager, click on the Contact Manager tab in the Preferences window. You can set the following options: This section discusses calendar-specific preferences. While looking at your calendar, select Preferences from the Edit menu. This will open up the Preferences window. It contains four tabs: Time display, Colors, To Do List and Alarms. The calendar preferences window is illustrated in .

If this worked on my job as well as my calendar...

The Time display tab lets you set the following: Time format You may choose between twelve-hour (AM/PM) and twenty-four hour time formats here by clicking the appropriate radio button. Weeks start on You can set weeks to start on Sunday or on Monday. Day range When does your work day start, and when does it end? In the day and week views, Evolution displays all the hours in the range you select here, even if there are no appointments for those times. Of course, you can still schedule an appointment outside of these hours, and if you do, the display will be extended to show it. The colors tab allows you to decide what color your calendar will be. The tab consists of a sample calendar on the right and a list of ten items that can be colored in different ways. If you click on the color button to the right of each item, you will bring up a color-selector window where you can choose to alter that color. By clicking OK in the color selection dialog, you can see the results of the color on the sample calendar. The display elements whose color you can set are: Outline: The lines between days and at the top of the display. Headings: Text color for day and month names and other headings. Empty days: This is the background color for any time slots in which you have no appointments. Appointments: This is the background color for any time slots in which you have appointments. Highlighted day: The background color for a selected time slot. Day numbers: Text color for date numbers. Current day's number: Text color for today's date. To-Do item that is not yet due: Text color for To-Do list items that are not yet due. (Or maybe background color? find out!) To-Do item that is due today: Text color for today's tasks. To-Do item that is overdue: Text color for overdue tasks. You can choose what information the To Do list displays and the way it is displayed. The two areas of the To Do List tab offer several options each: Show on To Do List This box contains three items. If you select the check boxes next to them, that information will appear in the To Do list for each task it contains: Due Date Time Until Due Priority Style Options Select among the following checkboxes to determine how your To Do list will look: Highlight overdue items Highlight items due today Highlight not yet due items The alarms tab enables you to select from three boxes: Beep on display alarms: select this box to have Evolution beep at you for any alarms you have set. If you leave this box unchecked, Evolution will only alert you to events by opening a dialog box. Audio alarms timeout after: Select this button to have the beeping stop automatically after a certain number of seconds. Enable snoozing for: If you would like to have the option to tell Evolution to repeat an alarm in a few minutes, select this button and decide how long you'd like it to wait. Additional configuration options will be covered here, as they become available.