So, in this article I am going to reveal some of the little secrets you may not have discovered with Evolution yet. Hopefully, after reading this, you will come away using one or two of these.

Assumptions

This article will assume you already have Evolution up and running and are familiar with it’s normal use. That is the only assumption made.

Search folders

Figure 2

Do you do a lot of searching through your email? If you do you might want to consider creating search folders. A search folder is a hybrid between a filter and a folder. Basically you set up a search folder and that folder will constantly be searching your mail for messages that meet your criteria. The main difference between a filter and a search folder is that the email that “lives” in a search folder isn’t actually moved there so you can have emails that span across multiple search folders (so long as they meet each folders criteria.).

To set up a search folder click Search > Create Folder From Search. This will start a filter-like “wizard” (see Figure 1) to walk you through the creation of the search folder. As you can see, in Figure 1, I am creating a search folder to contain search results of any incoming email with a subject that contains the phrase “Author notification”.  As soon as that wizard is finished the Notification folder is under Search Folders and contains 30 hits.

Saved searches

In the same vein as the Search Folders, you can also save a search criteria. To do this follow these steps:

1. Run a search as you would normally.
2. Click Search > Save Search.
3. In the new window give the search a name and click OK.

To use this search click the Search menu and select, from the bottom of the menu, the search you want to perform.

Mailing lists

Did you know you can subscribe to mailing lists or get information about mailing lists right from evolution? If you have an email from a mailing list, do the following:

Select that email (from the list).

Click Message > Mailing List and look through the sub-menu.

From that Mailing List sub-menu you can:

• Get list usage information.
• Subscribe/Unsubscribe to list.
• Post message to list.
• Contact list owner.
• Get list archive.

Very handy if you like your mailing lists.

Create from

From a simple email you can create an Event, Meeting, Task, or Memo. All you have to do is select the email, right click the email, and select any of the  Create entries from near the bottom of the menu.

Final thoughts

There you have it…a few lesser known features of Evolution. Although they are not show stoppers or deal breakers, these features do come in handy quite often. In future articles we’ll revisit this topic and come up with more lesser known features.

There is no word yet on what we can expect from this release, since it is a alpha release I would not advise to make the change immediately from Thunderbird 2 to Thunderbird 3. Word is that not all plugins and add-ons are working in Thunderbird 3. If you cannot wait to make the switch make sure you backup all your data before doing so.

I will wait until a final version of Thunderbird 3 has been posted or a portable version of it. I do not want to risk losing all my mails even if I have a backup.

One of the official sites states the following:

In order to elicit feedback on new feature ideas, and get early and frequent feedback from the tester community, we will be releasing several alpha and beta releases of Thunderbird.

These releases are not for production use, but for developers and testers to give us early feedback. To emphasize this point, these alpha releases are called Shredder — they do not represent the final state of any Thunderbird release, can contain significant bugs, and should be handled with appropriate care

A link to the release notes was posted on the same page:

Shredder Alpha 1 is built on top of the Gecko 1.9 platform, which has been under development for the past 33 months. Building on the previous release, Gecko 1.9 has more than 10,000 updates including some major re-architecting to provide improved performance, stability, rendering correctness, and code simplification and sustainability.

The main goals of this release is to find out about possible problems caused by the changes in the underlying platform. While much has changed in the underlying code, there are few new features in this release. Notable changes include:

• The new Add-ons Manager (Tools > Add-ons) can now be used to download and install a Thunderbird customization from the hundreds of Add-ons available from our community add-ons website. When you first open the Add-ons Manager, a list of recommended Add-ons is shown. Note that few add-ons are compatible with this early alpha at the time of release, as add-on developers need to upgrade them.)
• The address book can now read data from Mac OS X’s system Address Book, but that feature is currently disabled by default. To enable it, see this blog entry
• New Crash Reporter (Breakpad) to report crashes in Thunderbird.
• Searching bodies of messages no longer produces as many false positives and has become more accurate in some multilingual situations.
• Improvements to our JavaScript engine have resulted in continued improvements in performance.
• On the Mac, Thunderbird is now a native Cocoa application.
• There is a version of the DOM Inspector that works for Shredder Alpha 1, available from Mozilla Add-ons.
• There is a version of the Venkman debugger that works for Shredder Alpha 1.

The Rumbling Edge reports 850 changes in Thunderbird 3.0 alpha 1.