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.
Mail Settings
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.
Preferences DialogSetting mail preferencesIdentity Settings
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.
Network Settings
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.
Mail Sources
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.comUsername:
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.
Transports
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.
News Servers
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.
Other Mail Preferences
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
FormatHTML 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.
Managing the Contact Manager
To set the behavior of your Contact Manager, click on the
Contact Manager tab in the
Preferences window.
You can set the following options:
Configuring the Calendar
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 .
Calendar Preferences DialogIf this worked on my job as well as my calendar...Time Display Settings
The Time display tab lets you set the
following:
Time formatYou may choose between twelve-hour (AM/PM) and
twenty-four hour time formats here by clicking the
appropriate radio button.
Weeks start onYou 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.
Calendar Colors
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.
To Do List Settings
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 DateTime Until DuePriorityStyle Options
Select among the following checkboxes to determine
how your To Do list will look:
Highlight overdue itemsHighlight items due todayHighlight not yet due itemsAlarms Settings
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.
General Preferences
Additional configuration options will be covered here, as
they become available.
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