A User's Guide to Evolution
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# Introduction

# What is Evolution, and What Can It Do for Me?

Information is useless unless it's organized and accessible; it's hardly even worth the name if you can't look at it and be informed. `Evolution`'s goal is to make the tasks of storing, organizing, and retrieving information easier, so you can work and communicate with others. That is, it's a more evolved groupware program, an integral part of the Internet-connected desktop. On the inside, it's a powerful database; on the outside, it's a tool to help you get your work done.

Because it's part of the GNOME project, `Evolution` is free software. The program and its source code are released under the terms of the GNU Public License (GPL), and the documentation falls under the Free Documentation License (FDL). For more information about the GPL and the FDL, visit the Free Software Foundation's website at http://www.fsf.org.

| This is a preview release
| `Evolution` is not complete, and still has a lot of flaws. Please help improve it by letting us know about them. You should do this by submitting bug reports with the GNOME `Bug Report Tool` (known as bug-buddy at the command line).

`Evolution` can help you work in a group, by handling email, address and other contact information, and one or more calendars. It can do that on one or several computers, connected directly or over a network, for one person or for large groups. `Evolution` can handle almost all your communications and information management tasks with the power and flexibility of the GNOME desktop environment.

The developers of `Evolution` had four major goals for their project:

- The application must be both powerful and easy to use. That means a familiar and intuitive interface that users could customize to their liking, and the development of shortcuts for complex tasks.

- `Evolution` must meet and exceed the standards set by other groupware products. It must include support for most major network protocols so that it can integrate seamlessly with existing hardware and network environments.

- The project must support open standards and be open to expansion, so that it can become a development platform as well as an application. From the simplest scripting to the most complex network and component programming, `Evolution` must offer developers an environment for cutting-edge application development.

- Data must be safe: `Evolution` must not lose mail, corrupt mailbox files or other data, execute arbitrary scripts, or delete files from your hard disk.

`Evolution` is designed to make most daily tasks faster. For example, it takes only one or two clicks to enter an appointment or an address card sent to you by email, or to send email to a contact or appointment. `Evolution` makes displays faster and more efficient, so searches are faster and memory usage is lower. People who get lots of mail will appreciate advanced features like vFolders, which let you save searches as though they were ordinary mail folders.

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