The menu bar's contents will always provide all the possible actions for any given view of your data. That means that, depending on the context, menu bar items will change. If you're looking at your Inbox, most of the menu items will relate to mail; some will relate to other components of Evolution and some, especially those in the File Menu will relate to the application as a whole. The contents of the menu bar are described in Chapter 11.
Anything even related to a file or to the operations of the application generally falls under this menu: creating things, saving them to disk, printing them, and quitting the program itself.
The Edit menu holds useful tools that help you edit text and move it around.
This menu lets you decide how Evolution should look. Some of the features control the appearance of Evolution as a whole, and others the way a particular kind of information appears.
Tools for configuring, changing, and setting up go here. For mail, that means things like Mail Configuration and the Virtual Folder Editor. For the Calendar and the Contact Manager, it's color, network, and layout configuration.
Select among these items to open the Help Browser and read the Evolution manual.
Other menus, like Folder, Message, and Actions, appear only occasionally. Message and Folder, for example, have commands that only relate to email, so they're only available when you're looking at email.
Once you've familiarized yourself with the main window you can start doing things with it. We'll start with your email inbox, since you've got a letter waiting for you already.