GNOME Evolution
personal information manager software and workgroup information management tool for GNOME
GNOME Evolution (formerly Novell Evolution and Ximian Evolution, before Novell acquired Ximian in 2003) is the official personal information manager for GNOME. It has been an official part of GNOME since Evolution 2.0 was included with the GNOME 2.8 release in September 2004. It combines email, address book, calendar, task list, and note-taking features. Its user interface and functions are similar to Microsoft Outlook. Evolution is free software licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL).
Features
Evolution delivers the following features:
Email retrieval with the Post Office Protocol (POP) and Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) protocols and email transmission with Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP);
Secure network connections encrypted with Transport Layer Security (SSL, TLS), and STARTTLS;
Email encryption with GNU Privacy Guard (GPG) andSecure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (S/MIME);
Markdown email formatting;
Email filters;
Search folders: saved searches that look like normal mail folders as an alternative to using filters and search queries;
Automatic spam filtering with SpamAssassin and Bogofilter;
Connectivity to Microsoft Exchange Server, Novell GroupWise and Kolab (provided in separate packages as plug-ins);
Calendar support for the iCalendar file format, the WebDAV and CalDAV standards and Google Calendar;
Contact management with local address books, CardDAV, LDAP and Google address books;
Synchronization via SyncML with SyncEvolution and with Palm OS devices via gnome-pilot;
Address books that can be used as a data source in LibreOffice;
User avatars loading from address book, email headers X-Face, Face or automatic lookup by hashed email address from Gravatar service;
An RSS reader plug-in;
A news client;
Import from Microsoft Outlook archives (dbx, pst) and Berkeley Mailbox.
The Novell GroupWise plug-in is no longer in active development. A Scalix plug-in is also available, but its development stopped in 2009.
Evolution Data Server
Evolution Data Server (EDS) is a set of libraries and session services for storing address books and calendars. Other software such as California and GNOME Calendar depends on EDS also.
Some documentation about the software architecture is available in the GNOME wiki.
The public source identifies “GNOME Evolution” as personal information manager software and workgroup information management tool for GNOME. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around GNOME, Evolution and personal.
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Stable identifiers, scientific names and standards terminology offer the best bridge between this overview and specialist evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q336251. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2003, 2004 and 2009.
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This entry incorporates text from “GNOME Evolution” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.