A User's Guide to Evolution
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# Organizing Your Mail

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.

## Getting Organized with Folders

`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.

## Searching for Messages

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:

`Body or subject contains:`

  This will search message subjects and the messages themselves for the word or phrase you've entered in the search field.

`Body contains:`

  This will search only in message text, not the subject lines.

`Subject contains:`

  This will show you messages where the search text is in the subject line. It will not search in the message body.

`Body does not contain:`

  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.

`Subject does not contain:`

  This finds every mail whose subject does not contain the search text.

Then, press Enter. `Evolution` will show your search results in the message list.

## Staying organized: Mail Filters in Evolution

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.

Figure 4. The Filter Assistant

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 `Incoming` to display those filters which are performed on incoming mail, and `On Demand` for those which are performed only when you want.

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.

If you don't have any filters set up, the only one of those buttons you can click is Add. When you do that, (or when you click Edit with a filter selected), the Add Rule window appears.

That window, shown in Figure 5, is where you'll actually create your filtering rule.

Figure 5. Creating a new Filter

Enter a name for your filter in the `Rule Name` field, and then begin choosing criteria. Choose how many criteria you'd like by pressing Add Criterion and Remove Criterion. If you have multiple criteria, you should then decide whether to have the filter do its job only `if all criteria are met`, or `if any criteria are met`.

For each of your filter criteria, you must first select what part of the message you want the filter to look at:

`Sender`

  The author of the message.

`Recipients`

  The recipients of the message.

`Subject`

  The subject line of the message.

`Specific Header`

  The filter can look at any header you want, even obscure or custom ones like X-Bonus or X-Archive. Enter the header name, and what you'd like to match inside it.

`Message Body`

  The actual text of the message.

`Expression`

  Enter a regular expression, and `Evolution` will search the entire message, headers and all, to match it for you.

`Date Sent`

  You can filter messages by when they were sent: First, choose how you'd like to match the time— `before`, `after` and so forth. Then, choose the time. The filter compare the message's time-stamp to the system clock when the filter is run, or to a specific time and date you choose from a calendar. You can even have it look for messages within a range of time relative to the filter. For example, you could have the filter catch all messages sent less than a week before the filter is run.

`Date Recieved`

  This works the same way as the `Date Sent` option, except that it compares the time you got the message with the dates you specify.

`Priority`

  Emails have a standard priority range from -3 (least important) to 3 (most important). If you can persuade your friends and co-workers to use the priority levels honestly, you can filter with them as well.

Now, tell it what to do with those messages. If you want multiple actions, click Add Action; if you want fewer, click Remove Action. And choose again:

`Move to Folder`

  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.

`Forward to Address`

  Select this, enter an address, and the addressee will get a copy of the message.

`Delete`

  Marks the message for deletion. You can still get the message back, at least until you Expunge your mail yourself.

`Stop Processing`

  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.

`Assign Color`

  Select this item, and `Evolution` will mark the message with whatever color you please.

`Assign Score`

  Priority numbers alone don't work, so you can score emails on the same scale. Then, you can tell which ones you want to read, or have scored messages moved, copied, or colored in a subsequent filter.

You're done. Click OK to use this filter, or Cancel to close the window without saving any changes.

| Two Notable Filter Features

- Incoming email that your filters don't move goes into the Inbox; outgoing mail that they don't move ends up in the Sent folder.

- If you move a folder, your filters will follow it.

## Getting Really Organized with Virtual Folders

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 Tools->vFolder Editor. This will bring up a dialog box that looks suspiciously like the filter window (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 created any vFolders, they are listed here, and you can select, edit or remove them if you wish. 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 it is that you want to find, be it a line of text, a score, a regular expression, or a particular date or range of dates.

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

Figure 6. Selecting a vFolder Rule

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