Mail Preferences

The Mail Preferences tool lets you choose how to display citations, how long to wait before marking a message as read, and other mail display settings.

For information on individual e-mail account settings, see Working with Mail Accounts.

8.4.1. General Mail Settings

The following options are available:

Message Fonts:

Normally, Evolution uses the same fonts as other GNOME applications. To choose different fonts, deselect Use the same fonts as other applications and select one font for standard typefaces and a second for monospace.

Message Display:

Choose how long you want to wait before marking a message read, how to highlight quotations, and the default encoding. Enable Fall back to threading message by subject to group the messages as message threads. You can also set the limit to the number of addresses displayed in the message header by enabling the Shrink To/CC/BCC header to option. You can also set the limit for rendering text content in the message you receive. By default, when you receive a message with text content more than 4096 Kilobytes, Evolution will not render the message in the preview pane. You can view unformatted text either inline or using an external application. You can also enable the Magic spacebar and search folders.

To group the messages as threads select View > Group By threads or press Ctrl+T.

Deleting Mail:

Choose whether to delete messages automatically when quitting Evolution and how frequently, and whether you want to explicitly confirm the final deletion of messages. Select Confirm when expunging a folder to confirm the final deletion. You can have four different options to set the frequency for deletion: Everytime, Once per day, Once per week, and Once per month.

New Mail Notifications:

Evolution can alert you to the arrival of new mail with a beep or by playing a sound file. Choose your alert noise, or select none, as you prefer. You can choose not to notify on new mail arrival.

8.4.2. HTML Mail Preferences

The following options are available:

Show Image Animations:

Turns image animation (e.g. GIF files) on or off.

Prompt When Sending HTML Messages to Contacts That Don't Want Them:

Some people do not like HTML mail, and you can set Evolution to warn you of this preference. This warning appears only when you send HTML mail to people in your contacts who are listed as disliking HTML.

Loading Images:

You can embed a image in an e-mail and have it load only when the message arrives. However, spammers can use image loading patterns to confirm “valid” addresses and invade your privacy. You can elect to never load images automatically, to load images only if the sender is in your contacts, or always load images.

If you have chosen not to load images automatically, you can choose to see the images in one message at a time by selecting View > Load Images or press Ctrl+I.

8.4.3. Label Preferences

The Label preferences option lets you add colour labels for different kinds of messages. You can add, edit, or remove the labels. You can also assign colours to each label you create. You cannot remove the default labels.

To create a label:

  1. Click Add and specify the name in the Label Name dialogue box.
  2. Click the colour tab and select a colour, then click OK.

To edit label properties:

  1. Select the label and click Edit.
  2. Edit name and colour, then click OK.

To assign a label to a specific e-mail message:

  1. Right-click the message from the message preview.

  2. Click Label and select the desired label for the message.

8.4.4. Mail Header Preferences

The headers on an incoming message are the information about the message that isn't the content of the message itself, such as the sender and the time it was sent. Select the options here to show or hide different amounts of information about the messages you read. You can also add or remove new mail headers to the list. The default mail headers cannot be removed.

Sender Photograph:

This feature adds support for viewing the photograph of the sender at the right-hand side of the preview pane.

To enable this feature, select Edit > Preferences > Mail Preferences > Headers > Show the photograph of sender in the e-mail preview. Deselect this option to disable this feature.

By default it searches only in the local address books enabled for autocompletion. If you deselect the option Search for sender photograph only in the local address book, it searches in all the address books enabled for autocompletion. If there are multiple matches for the same contact, it always takes the first one. Consider a contact that has multiple matches — the first one with a photograph and the second without a photo. Here, Evolution takes the first contact regardless of it not having a photograph.

This feature is disabled by default as it causes delay in fetching the messages.

Configurable Date and Time Format

Although Evolution components have a set of predefined date and time formats, an advanced user can write acceptable strftime, with new tag %ad for an abbreviated date to show in tables and date headers.

8.4.5. Junk Mail Preferences

You can check your incoming messages for junk content by using Bogofilter and SpamAssassin* tools, which have trainable Bayesian filters. You need to enable the Junk plugins to start filtering junk mail.

To enable Junk plugins:

  1. Select Edit > Plugins.
  2. Select the junk plugins you want. You can select either Bogofilter or SpamAssassin, or you can select both.
General:

You can check incoming e-mail for junk contents and also decide how often you want to delete junk mail. You also have the option to choose either SpamAssassin or Bogofilter, or you can select both.

Checking Incoming Mail for Junk:

This option turns automatic junk mail filtering on or off.

Delete junk mail on exit:

This option deletes junk messages when you exit. You can also specify when to delete the junk messages (every time, once per day, once per week, once per month).

Default junk plugin:

Select either SpamAssassin or Bogofilter, or both, as your junk filter. You can view them only if you have enabled the respective plugins. When you select any option, it also reports if the underlying binary is available or not.

SpamAssassin Options:

Remote Test performs junk mail filtering on remote servers. It also includes online tests, like checking for blacklisted message senders and ISPs.

This option uses tests that require a network connection, such as checking to see if a message is in a list of known junk messages, or if the sender or gateway are blacklisted by anti-spam organisations. Online tests can make filtering slower, because remote tests add to the amount of time it takes to check for junk mail, but they increase accuracy. When you select this option, you do not need to do any additional setup.

Bogofilter Options:

Select Convert mail text to Unicode to enable Unicode* filtering. For more information on Bogofilter, see the Bogofilter site.

Check new messages for junk contents option under Edit > Preferences > Mail Accounts > Edit > Receiving options is enabled only for IMAP. Check incoming mail for junk option under Edit > Preferences > Mail Preferences > Junk > General refers only to POP and Local Delivery.

8.4.6. Automatic Contacts Preferences

There are two items in this section: Automatic Contacts automatically adds people that you respond to into your address book. You can select the default address book for automatic contacts from the list.

Instant Messaging Contacts periodically synchronises contact information and images with your instant messaging program. Currently this only works with Pidgin. Your address book must not be a read-only one for both these features to function properly.

8.4.7. Calendar and Tasks Preferences

Allows you to delete messages after you have acted on an appointment. It also allows you to select calendars to search for meeting conflicts.