A User's Guide to Evolution | ||
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Even if you only get a few email messages a day, you probably want to sort and organize them. When you get a hundred a day and you want to refer to a message you received six weeks ago, you need to sort and organize them. Fortunately, Evolution has the tools to help you do it.
Evolution keeps mail, as well as address cards and calendars, in folders. You start out with a few, like Inbox, Outbox, and Drafts, but you can create as many as you like. Create new folders by selecting New and then Folder from the File menu. Evolution will as you for the name and the type of the folder, and will provide you with a folder tree so you can pick where it goes.
When you click OK, your new folder will appear in the folder view. You can then put messages in it by dragging and dropping them, or by using the Move button in the toolbar. If you create a filter with the filter assistant, you can have mail moved to your folder automatically.
Most mail clients can search through your messages for you, but Evolution does it faster. You can search through just the message subjects, just the message body, or both body and subject.
To start searching, enter a word or phrase in the text area right below the toolbar, and choose a search type:
This will search message subjects and the messages themselves for the word or phrase you've entered in the search field.
This will search only in message text, not the subject lines.
This will show you messages where the search text is in the subject line. It will not search in the message body.
This finds every email message that does not have the search text in the message body. It will still show messages that have the search text in the subject line, if it is not also in the body.
This finds every mail whose subject does not contain the search text.
I once worked in the mail room of a large company, where my job was to bundle, sort, and distribute mail to the various mail boxes and desks throughout the building. Filters do that same job with email, but they lose much less mail than I did. In addition, you can have multiple filters performing multiple actions that may effect the same message in several ways. For example, your filters could put copies of one message into multiple folders, or keep a copy and send one to another person as well. Which is to say, it's quite a bit more flexible than an actual person with a pile of envelopes.
Most often, you'll want to have Evolution put mail into different folders, but you can have it do almost anything you like. People who subscribe to multiple mailing lists, or who often need to refer to messages they have sent, find filters especially helpful to separate personal from list-related mail, but they're good for anybody who gets more than a few messages a day. To create a filter, open the filter assistant by selecting Tools->Mail Filters.
The filter assistant window contains a list of your current filters, sorted by the order in which they will be performed. From the drop-down box at the top of the window, choose whether to display all your filters, only those filters which are performed on incoming mail, or only filters for outgoing mail.
The filter assistant also has a set of buttons:
Add — Create a new filter.
Edit — Edit an existing filter.
Delete — Delete the selected filter.
Up — Move the selected filter up in the list, so it will be performed sooner.
Down — Move the selected filter down in the list, so it will be performed later.
That window, shown in Figure 5, is where you'll actually create your filtering rule.
Enter a name for your filter in the Name field, and then begin choosing criteria. Choose how many criteria you'd like by pressing More and Fewer. You can choose from five types of criteria, and you can have as many as you like; at least, I've never found a maximum. If you have multiple criteria, you'll want to decide between Match all parts, which will make the filter affect only those messages which meet all the criteria you're about to describe, and Match any part, which will make the filter affect any message that meets even one of the criteria.
For each of your filter criteria, you must first select what part of the message you want the filter to look at:
The author of the message.
The recipients of the message.
The subject line of the message.
The message body.
Enter a regular expression, and Evolution will match it for you.
Then choose a rule for matching:
If the part of the message examined contains the text you enter, the filter will perform its selected action.
If the part of the message examined does not contain the text you enter, the filter will perform its selected action.
Then, enter the text you want the filter to find, and you're done telling Evolution what sort of messages you want it to filter.
Now, tell it what to do with those messages. If you want multiple actions, click More; if you want fewer, click Fewer. And choose again:
If you select this item, Evolution will put the messages into a folder you specify. Click the <click here to select a folder> button to select a folder.
Select this, enter an address, and the addressee will get a copy of the message.
Marks the message for deletion. You can still get the message back, at least until you Expunge your mail yourself.
Select this if you want to tell all other filters to ignore this message. If multiple filters copy the message to a different folders, you'll have multiple copies of the message.
Select this item, and Evolution will mark the message with whatever color you please.
You're done. Click OK to use this filter, or Cancel to close the window without saving any changes.
![]() | Two Notable Filter Features |
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If filters aren't flexible enough for you, or you find yourself performing the same search again and again, consider a virtual folder. Virtual folders, or vFolders, are an advanced way of viewing your email messages within Evolution. If you get a lot of mail or often forget where you put messages, vFolders can help you stay on top of things.
A vFolder is really a hybrid of all the other organizational tools: it looks like a folder, it acts like a search, and you set it up like a filter. In other words, while a conventional folder actually contains messages, a vFolder is a view of messages that may be in several different folders. The messages it contains are determined on the fly using a set of criteria you choose in advance.
As messages that meet the vFolder criteria arrive or are deleted, Evolution will automatically place them in and and remove them from the vFolder contents list. When you delete a message, it gets erased from the folder in which it actually exists, as well as any vFolders which display it.
Imagine a business trying to keep track of mail from hundreds of vendors and clients, or a university with overlapping and changing groups of faculty, staff, administrators and students. The more mail you need to organize, the less you can afford the sort of confusion that stems from an organizational system that's not flexible enough. vFolders make for better organization because they can accept overlapping groups in a way that regular folders and filing systems can't.
Example 4. Using Folders, Searches, and vFolders
To organize my mail box, I set up a vFolder for emails from my friend and co-worker Anna. I have another one for messages from anybody at work that have "Evolution" in the subject line, so I can keep a record of what people from work send me about Evolution. If Anna sends a message about a picnic on Saturday, it only shows up in the "Anna" folder. When Anna sends me mail about the user interface for Evolution, I can see that message both in the "Anna" vFolder and in the "Internal Evolution Discussion" vFolder.
To create a vFolder, select VFolder Editor from the Tools menu in the main window. This will bring up a dialog box that looks suspiciously like the Filter Assistant (for more information on filters, see the section called Staying organized: Mail Filters in Evolution), and which presents you with a list of vFolders you have previously created. If you have already created vFolders, you can click on them in the frame labelled Select Rule Type, and edit or remove them. If you have not created any, there will be only one available option: click Add to add a new vFolder.
You can enter a name for your vFolder in the Name. Then, tell Evolution what messages to look for. This process is exactly like filter creation: decide between Match all parts and Match any part, then choose what part of the message to look in, what sort of matching to perform, and specify exactly what text it is that you want to find.
The second part, however, is slightly different. In the section of the window labelled vFolder Sources is a list of folders in which Evolution will search for the contents of your vFolder. Click Add to add a folder, or Remove to remove one. That way, you can have your vFolder search in newsgroups, or just in one of your mailboxes, or just in a select few folders you've already screened with filters.
The vFolder creation window is shown in Figure 6
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