apt and setting up email accounts

[MICHAEL WEAVER]

As someone who is Totally Blind who may not be able to access the 
notification for updating Edgy, how often should I run apt?
Should I always do a sudo apt-get update followed by a sudo apt-get dist 
upgrade when I do this?
Also I am thinking about setting up email for Linux on my laptop but am 
not sure what settings to put for my BT account in Evolution as I only 
have my desktop PC running Windows with the settings in Outlook Express 
and Thunderbird.
I tried to set it up before I lost speech on my laptop which resulted in 
me clearing everything and starting afresh yesterday when I re-installed 
Edgy in order to get Orca working again. I ran into a problem connecting 
after I set up email when I had my laptop connected to my wired 
Broadband MODEM which is a BT Voyager which I know does seem to work 
under Ubuntu as I was able to download Text based web browsers before I 
had problems with the speech.