A User's Guide to Evolution | ||
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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 Figure 1. Mail Preferences are separated into several categories:
This allows you to set your name, email address, and other information. The default values are the ones found on your system account.
Set your mail-checking protocols and servers here.
Set your mail-checking protocols and servers here.
Specify your News Server preferences here.
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:
Select from IMAP, POP or Unix-style mbox files.
Enter the name of your mail server in this field. For example: mail.mycompany.com
Enter your user name here. Eva Lucianne Tester's user name is eltester.
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.
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.
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 the section called Embellish your email with HTML in the chapter called Evolution Mail for more information about HTML mail.
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.
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