The information you need at hand to set up an email account is not always straightforward. Some of the data is self-evident or within ready grasp, including your email address, email USER ID, and email PASSWORD. Examples of these are shown in Table 6-2. You created these items when you opened your email account. Your Internet service provider (ISP) or Web-mail service provider can provide help if you should have any questions or difficulties with these.

Other setup information, including the names and protocols of your incoming and outgoing email servers, may take you a bit of effort to gather by yourself. You can get them from your system administrator, ISP or Web-mail service provider. Examples are shown in Table 6-3.

If you are a confident and self-sufficient user, gathering your email server information can be fairly easy, with some common sense and the assistance of the Web. You can look up your Incoming and Outgoing email server names by consulting the Help or Support pages of your Internet or Web-mail service provider. Alternatively, it may be even easier to go to a search engine and enter some variation of the following search strings:

These strings may bring up resulting links to content containing references to the mail server names of your ISP or Web-mail service provider. Double check that the search output is current, however; outdated information lasts a long time on the Web.

Generally, the following guidelines may be helpful. Your Incoming Mail Server is either a) the Incoming mail server of your ISP; or b) the Incoming mail server of your Web-mail service provider (for example, Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, or any other third-party Web-mail service that you may be using instead of your ISP). In the example setup in Figures 6-4 through 6-10, the Web-mail service provider is Cloud 9, a Web-mail service provider in the New York City region.

Your Outgoing email server is always an Outgoing email server associated with your ISP (the company providing your Internet connection). In the example setup in Table 6-4, the ISP is NYC - Roadrunner, a national Internet service provider.

Upon first booting up JDS and opening Email and Calendar (Launch->Email and Calendar), you encounter a setup wizard called Evolution Setup Assistant that leads you through a dozen screens to help you configure your first email account. Figures 6-4 through 6-10 offer an example of an email setup that works for one of the authors’ configurations.

After the Welcome screen (Figure 6-4, you come to the Identity screen (Figure 6-5, where you should enter your name and email address in the appropriate fields in the Required Information section.

Figure 6-4. The Welcome screen

Figure 6-5. The Identity screen

The information entered here (Figure 6-6 is used by Email and Calendar for header information that’s displayed in the email you send.

Figure 6-6. Identity screen, filled in successfully

Next, select your email server type. In Figure 6-7, POP is usually the appropriate selection. Check with your ISP, Web-mail service provider, or system administrator if you are unsure of your Server Type for receiving email. (See Figure 6-8.)

Figure 6-7. The Receiving Mail window

Figure 6-8. Selecting your email server

Next, enter the host name or incoming email server name in the Host field. (Some examples of common incoming [or receiving] email server names are offered in Table 6-4, in the middle column, under Incoming Mail Server.)

The wizard automatically fills in your Username, based on the front part of the email address (the part before the @ symbol) that you entered earlier (See Table 6-2). Make sure that this is the email USER ID by which your account is known to your Internet or Web-mail service provider. (See Figure 6-9.)

Figure 6-9. The Receiving Mail dialog, filled in successfully

After filling in your email server information, click the Forward button and proceed to the screen for additional email options.

In Figure 6-10, you can check the box if you want to make your system automatically check your email server for new email once every 10 minutes (10 minutes is the default that’s set in the spinner). You can tweak the system to check either more or less frequently than 10 minutes. Leaving it alone works fine for most users. Leaving the box unchecked altogether means that the system checks for new email only when you explicitly press the Send / Receive button, which also works fine for most users.

Figure 6-10. Receiving Mail

The Message Storage option (Figure 6-10 is an important consideration if you plan to access your email from more than one computer and you are using POP mail. If this is your first email account setup on your main or primary workstation (where you plan to archive the more important pieces of email in folders), it’s a good idea to leave this Message Storage option unchecked. This clears email off your ISP’s or Web-mail service provider’s email servers each time you access email. This is helpful because it keeps your inbox at the email server from getting full, by moving your email (when you ask to read it) to your local workstation, which has ample disk space.

Alternatively, when you are setting up a secondary workstation to access your email account (a family member’s computer, for example, that you use from time to time), you may check the box “Leave messages on server” on that machine. This way, when you access email from that computer, your email stays on your ISP’s or Web-mail service provider’s email server until you access and download it later on from your own primary workstation. Later, you can archive your important email locally on your primary workstation, at which time it is automatically cleared out from your ISP’s or Web-mail service provider’s email server.

Fill in the Sending Mail screen (Figure 6-11) with the appropriate outgoing email Server Type and Host name. See Table 6-4 for examples of sending or outgoing mail server names.

Figure 6-11. The Sending Mail screen, filled in successfully

In the Account Management screen (Figure 6-12, set the name for your email account as a label and set this account as the default if it’s your primary or only account.

Figure 6-12. The Account Management screen

In Figure 6-12, leaving the settings as you see them is fine in most cases. The first email account you set up is always the default account. If you later set up additional email accounts, you can establish an account naming scheme that does not simply default to the email address, if doing so helps you keep track of your different accounts. You can change the default (primary) account setting here, too.

You can always go back to edit any email account settings via Tools → Settings, where you can select an account and edit its incoming and outgoing servers, and all other settings you’ve encountered here from Figure 6-4 through Figure 6-12.

Next, you must choose your time zone. (See Figure 6-13.)

Figure 6-13. The Timezone screen

Finally, click the Apply button to finish the email account setup process. (See Figure 6-14.)

Figure 6-14. First view, once configured

Download mail by clicking Send/Receive on the toolbar, near the top of the Email window. The first time you click it, you are prompted (Figure 6-15 to enter your email password. Enter it here. For convenience, you can check the box for JDS to “Remember this password,” and JDS will hold your password on the system, so you don’t have to reenter it each time you start up email.

Figure 6-15. Password prompt

If you are security-conscious, you can maintain an extra degree of password protection by leaving the Remember this password box unchecked. This requires that you enter your email password each time you click Send/Receive, or your system automatically checks the server for email. (See Figure 6-10.) For some people, the inconvenience is worth the added measure of security.

On Email and Calendar’s Main menu, third from left, is the View drop-down menu. Here you can customize your view of the Inbox. (The drop-down menu changes according to which dimension of Email and Calendar—Inbox, Calendar, Contacts, Tasks or Summary—is currently open.)

The four aspects of Inbox Views for email folders are:

Current View lists the mail in your Inbox, along with a Preview Pane that shows you the top few lines of a single email message. This view allows you to establish how email is sorted in your Inbox (by Subject, Sender, Status or other criteria). The Shortcut Bar and Folder Bar offer two different options for quickly navigating from Inbox to another of the dimensions: Calendar, Contacts, Tasks, or Summary.

If desired, you can uncheck all the View choices, leaving only the Inbox visible.

At the top lefthand side of the Email and Calendar program’s toolbar is the New button. Clicking it launches a fresh Compose window, shown in Figure 6-24.

Figure 6-24. “Compose a message” window, default view

If you want to include one or more colleagues on an email you are sending, invoke the “Cc Field” in the “Compose a message” window by checking the box, View → Cc Field, in the current Compose window.

Email and Calendar also provides a feature called “blind carbon copy,” or Bcc field. The “To” and/or “Cc” recipients cannot see the “Bcc” person’s email address in the header of the received email. To send a blind carbon copy, check the box of View → Bcc Field in the current Compose window and enter there the email address of the contact to whom you want to discretely send the email. Figure 6-25 shows a Compose window set with all email recipients visible.

Figure 6-25. All recipients and attachments visible

In Contacts, click the New button at the top left of the toolbar, and a fresh blank window appears (Figure 6-26 for you to enter Name, Job Title, Organization, Email Address(es), Postal Address, Phone Numbers, and various other useful information.

Figure 6-26. Adding a contact record

After you have finished entering the relevant information for this person or record, click the “Save and Close” button at the top left of the toolbar, and the entry is complete and saved.

There are several ways to delete an existing entry from Contacts. The quickest is to right-click on the gray name bar at the top of the record you intend to delete, then select Delete at the bottom of the menu that appears. A confirmation window next appears: press the Delete button to delete the record.

Alternatively, click on the gray name bar of the record you want to delete. It turns blue, upon the click. Then press the Delete key on your keyboard, and a confirmation window opens asking if you are sure. Proceed as above.

Figure 6-67 shows Calendar in “Work Week” view. You can alter the view by clicking one of the view icons on the toolbar. The four distinct views include:

Figure 6-27. Calendar in Work Week view

An alternative way of changing view is from the Main menu: select View → Current View and choose among the four views.

Note that three views of Calendar, all except Month View, integrate a Tasks pane in the lower-right corner and a handy set of monthly calendars in the upper-right corner. There, the current date is always outlined in red.

These monthly calendars have a special feature where you can highlight any number of contiguous days, by clicking and dragging the pointer over the days, and the main calendar pane sets to those dates. Figure 6-28 illustrates an example in which the contiguous days highlighted are March 9^th through March 11^th.

Figure 6-28. Highlighting contiguous days

In the monthly calendar at the upper right, you can move to the next or previous month by clicking the little triangle that appears at the left or at the right of the month’s name. When displaying a day, you can add an event to your calendar by double-clicking on the day or a time segment within the day.

Just like email itself, the news and weather links in the Summary dimension require an Internet connection to function.

The first time you open Email and Calendar (after the very first time you bootup JDS), the default News & Weather links visible on the Summary page may not suit your needs or taste, and they may not be relevant to your location. It is quite easy to change these links from within Email and Calendar by going into Tools → Settings and clicking on Summary Preferences in the lefthand index.

Here, click the News Feeds tab, second from left, where you see a list of available feeds in the All column at the left. The righthand column, labeled Shown, includes the News Feeds that are visible on the Summary page. You can delete feeds you don’t want by highlighting the feed in the Shown column with either a right- or left-click and then by clicking the Remove button. To add a desired feed from the All column at the left, simply highlight the feed you want and click the Add button, and it will appear in the Shown column. Save your changes, as usual, by clicking the OK button when you are finished.

Signatures are saved blocks of text that you can compose in advance and then set to include automatically at the bottom of email messages. Signatures can be used to simply identify you or offer a few chosen words or important hyperlinks to recipients of your email. When you enter and set Signatures, you can have them appear automatically at the bottom of every email you compose, reply to, or forward; or you can have no Signatures attach automatically, permitting you to select one manually from your list of Signatures to have more control.

To set up any number of different Signatures, run through the following steps:

Figure 6-29. Creating a Signature

After entering the Signature text in the “Edit signature” window, select File → Save and Close, or click the Save icon at the top left of the toolbar. Repeat the procedure to add additional Signatures, if desired. You may later edit existing Signatures via this method, too.

An alternative method for adding Signatures is through the Evolution Email Account Editor via Tools → Settings at the Mail Accounts dialog. Here, highlight any email account and click the Edit button on the right side of the dialog box. This opens the Evolution Account Editor, where, at the bottom right, you find an Add Signatures button. Clicking Add Signatures opens up the Edit signatures box, where you can repeat the Signature creation process described above.

JDS Email and Calendar includes features for integrating email with the robust Public-Key Infrastructure (PKI) encryption software that runs on JDS. With encryption integration, security-conscious users benefit from being able to key-sign or authenticate their outgoing email—that is, to verify that the email truly comes from them and has not been altered by a third party. They can also send encrypted email to others as well as de-crypt email that arrives in encrypted form from other parties.

To use these security features, JDS users need a public and private key-set and need to be able to set up either PGP (Perfectly Good Privacy, http://www.pgp.org) or GPG (GNU Privacy Guard, http://www.gnupg.org) on their system. The operation of the PGP or GPG encryption software products that implement secure email are beyond the scope of this book.

The JDS email security features are enabled in Tools → Settings under Mail Accounts. Click an account in the list to highlight it and then choose Edit. The tab that appears on the far right, labeled Security, is where you enter your PGP or GPG Key ID and establish other desired settings for email authentication and encryption services.

Active email users may find Contact Lists indispensable. These let you create lists of multiple names for sending a single email message to many people simultaneously and for making sure that no relevant person is forgotten each time you have information to convey to the group. This can be considered a low-grade form of spam, so Contact Lists should be used carefully, with forethought. However, when used judiciously, Contact Lists can save a great deal of repetitive effort.

To create a new Contact List, go to your Contacts and right-click the gray name bar of any existing Contact entry. A drop-down list appears with “New Contact List . . . " second from the top. (See Figure 6-30.) Click on “New Contact List . . . " and up pops the “Contact List Editor” window.

Figure 6-30. Creating an email Group

To create a new Contact List, proceed to type in a Name for the new list. Then you can either manually enter email addresses, clicking the Add button each time, or drag and drop existing email contacts into the list window. When you finish building the new contacts list, click the Save and Close button at the top lefthand side of the toolbar. (See Figure 6-31.)

Figure 6-31. Contact List Editor awaiting input