GNOME Evolution 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 e-mail, address book, calendar, task list and note-taking features. Its user interface and functionality is similar to Microsoft Outlook. Evolution is free software licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL).

Evolution delivers the following features:

• E-mail retrieval with the POP and IMAP protocols and e-mail transmission with SMTP
• Secure network connections encrypted with SSL, TLS and STARTTLS
• E-mail encryption with GPG and S/MIME
• E-mail 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^[8] (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 Libreng Office
• User avatars loading from address book, e-mail headers X-Face, Face or automatic lookup by hashed e-mail address from Gravatar service
• An RSS reader plug-in^[9]
• Import from Microsoft Outlook archives (dbx, pst) and Berkley Mailbox