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 your personal information easier, so you can work and communicate with others. That is, it's a highly evolved 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 General 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.

NoteThis 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 on the Ximian GNOME bug report page at bugzilla.ximian.com. There are detailed bug reporting instructions in .

Please send comments on the guide to . The first person to send me some good constructive criticism wins a free Ximian t-shirt.

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.

The Evolution project has four central goals:

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 Virtual Folders, which let you save searches as though they were ordinary mail folders.