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--- The Detailed Node Listing ---
Starting Gnus
New Groups
Group Buffer
Group Buffer Format
Group Topics
Misc Group Stuff
Summary Buffer
Summary Buffer Format
Choosing Articles
Reply, Followup and Post
Marking Articles
Threading
Customizing Threading
Decoding Articles
Decoding Variables
Article Treatment
Alternative Approaches
Various Summary Stuff
Article Buffer
Composing Messages
Select Methods
Server Buffer
Getting News
NNTP
Getting Mail
Mail Sources
Choosing a Mail Back End
Browsing the Web
IMAP
Other Sources
Document Groups
SOUP
Combined Groups
Email Based Diary
The NNDiary Back End
The Gnus Diary Library
Gnus Unplugged
Agent Categories
Agent Commands
Scoring
GroupLens
Advanced Scoring
Various
Formatting Variables
Image Enhancements
Thwarting Email Spam
Spam Package
Spam Statistics Package
Appendices
History
New Features
Customization
Gnus Reference Guide
Back End Interface
Various File Formats
Emacs for Heathens
If you are haven't used Emacs much before using Gnus, read Emacs for Heathens first.
If your system administrator has set things up properly, starting Gnus
and reading news is extremely easy—you just type M-x gnus in
your Emacs. If not, you should customize the variable
gnus-select-method as described in Finding the News. For a
minimal setup for posting should also customize the variables
user-full-name and user-mail-address.
If you want to start Gnus in a different frame, you can use the command M-x gnus-other-frame instead.
If things do not go smoothly at startup, you have to twiddle some variables in your ~/.gnus.el file. This file is similar to ~/.emacs, but is read when Gnus starts.
If you puzzle at any terms used in this manual, please refer to the terminology section (see Terminology).
The gnus-select-method variable says where Gnus should look for
news. This variable should be a list where the first element says
how and the second element says where. This method is your
native method. All groups not fetched with this method are
foreign groups.
For instance, if the `news.somewhere.edu' NNTP server is where you want to get your daily dosage of news from, you'd say:
(setq gnus-select-method '(nntp "news.somewhere.edu"))
If you want to read directly from the local spool, say:
(setq gnus-select-method '(nnspool ""))
If you can use a local spool, you probably should, as it will almost
certainly be much faster. But do not use the local spool if your
server is running Leafnode (which is a simple, standalone private news
server); in this case, use (nntp "localhost").
If this variable is not set, Gnus will take a look at the
NNTPSERVER environment variable. If that variable isn't set,
Gnus will see whether gnus-nntpserver-file
(/etc/nntpserver by default) has any opinions on the matter.
If that fails as well, Gnus will try to use the machine running Emacs
as an NNTP server. That's a long shot, though.
If gnus-nntp-server is set, this variable will override
gnus-select-method. You should therefore set
gnus-nntp-server to nil, which is what it is by default.
You can also make Gnus prompt you interactively for the name of an
NNTP server. If you give a non-numerical prefix to gnus
(i.e., C-u M-x gnus), Gnus will let you choose between the servers
in the gnus-secondary-servers list (if any). You can also just
type in the name of any server you feel like visiting. (Note that this
will set gnus-nntp-server, which means that if you then M-x
gnus later in the same Emacs session, Gnus will contact the same
server.)
However, if you use one NNTP server regularly and are just interested in a couple of groups from a different server, you would be better served by using the B command in the group buffer. It will let you have a look at what groups are available, and you can subscribe to any of the groups you want to. This also makes .newsrc maintenance much tidier. See Foreign Groups.
A slightly different approach to foreign groups is to set the
gnus-secondary-select-methods variable. The select methods
listed in this variable are in many ways just as native as the
gnus-select-method server. They will also be queried for active
files during startup (if that's required), and new newsgroups that
appear on these servers will be subscribed (or not) just as native
groups are.
For instance, if you use the nnmbox back end to read your mail,
you would typically set this variable to
(setq gnus-secondary-select-methods '((nnmbox "")))
If no startup files exist (see Startup Files), Gnus will try to determine what groups should be subscribed by default.
If the variable gnus-default-subscribed-newsgroups is set, Gnus
will subscribe you to just those groups in that list, leaving the rest
killed. Your system administrator should have set this variable to
something useful.
Since she hasn't, Gnus will just subscribe you to a few arbitrarily picked groups (i.e., `*.newusers'). (Arbitrary is defined here as whatever Lars thinks you should read.)
You'll also be subscribed to the Gnus documentation group, which should help you with most common problems.
If gnus-default-subscribed-newsgroups is t, Gnus will just
use the normal functions for handling new groups, and not do anything
special.
If the default server is down, Gnus will understandably have some problems starting. However, if you have some mail groups in addition to the news groups, you may want to start Gnus anyway.
Gnus, being the trusting sort of program, will ask whether to proceed without a native select method if that server can't be contacted. This will happen whether the server doesn't actually exist (i.e., you have given the wrong address) or the server has just momentarily taken ill for some reason or other. If you decide to continue and have no foreign groups, you'll find it difficult to actually do anything in the group buffer. But, hey, that's your problem. Blllrph!
If you know that the server is definitely down, or you just want to read
your mail without bothering with the server at all, you can use the
gnus-no-server command to start Gnus. That might come in handy
if you're in a hurry as well. This command will not attempt to contact
your primary server—instead, it will just activate all groups on level
1 and 2. (You should preferably keep no native groups on those two
levels.) Also see Group Levels.
You might want to run more than one Emacs with more than one Gnus at the same time. If you are using different .newsrc files (e.g., if you are using the two different Gnusae to read from two different servers), that is no problem whatsoever. You just do it.
The problem appears when you want to run two Gnusae that use the same .newsrc file.
To work around that problem some, we here at the Think-Tank at the Gnus Towers have come up with a new concept: Masters and slaves. (We have applied for a patent on this concept, and have taken out a copyright on those words. If you wish to use those words in conjunction with each other, you have to send $1 per usage instance to me. Usage of the patent (Master/Slave Relationships In Computer Applications) will be much more expensive, of course.)
Anyway, you start one Gnus up the normal way with M-x gnus (or however you do it). Each subsequent slave Gnusae should be started with M-x gnus-slave. These slaves won't save normal .newsrc files, but instead save slave files that contain information only on what groups have been read in the slave session. When a master Gnus starts, it will read (and delete) these slave files, incorporating all information from them. (The slave files will be read in the sequence they were created, so the latest changes will have precedence.)
Information from the slave files has, of course, precedence over the information in the normal (i.e., master) .newsrc file.
If the .newsrc* files have not been saved in the master when the slave starts, you may be prompted as to whether to read an auto-save file. If you answer “yes”, the unsaved changes to the master will be incorporated into the slave. If you answer “no”, the slave may see some messages as unread that have been read in the master.
If you are satisfied that you really never want to see any new groups,
you can set gnus-check-new-newsgroups to nil. This will
also save you some time at startup. Even if this variable is
nil, you can always subscribe to the new groups just by pressing
U in the group buffer (see Group Maintenance). This variable
is ask-server by default. If you set this variable to
always, then Gnus will query the back ends for new groups even
when you do the g command (see Scanning New Messages).
Gnus normally determines whether a group is new or not by comparing the
list of groups from the active file(s) with the lists of subscribed and
dead groups. This isn't a particularly fast method. If
gnus-check-new-newsgroups is ask-server, Gnus will ask the
server for new groups since the last time. This is both faster and
cheaper. This also means that you can get rid of the list of killed
groups altogether, so you may set gnus-save-killed-list to
nil, which will save time both at startup, at exit, and all over.
Saves disk space, too. Why isn't this the default, then?
Unfortunately, not all servers support this command.
I bet I know what you're thinking now: How do I find out whether my
server supports ask-server? No? Good, because I don't have a
fail-safe answer. I would suggest just setting this variable to
ask-server and see whether any new groups appear within the next
few days. If any do, then it works. If none do, then it doesn't
work. I could write a function to make Gnus guess whether the server
supports ask-server, but it would just be a guess. So I won't.
You could telnet to the server and say HELP and see
whether it lists `NEWGROUPS' among the commands it understands. If
it does, then it might work. (But there are servers that lists
`NEWGROUPS' without supporting the function properly.)
This variable can also be a list of select methods. If so, Gnus will
issue an ask-server command to each of the select methods, and
subscribe them (or not) using the normal methods. This might be handy
if you are monitoring a few servers for new groups. A side effect is
that startup will take much longer, so you can meditate while waiting.
Use the mantra “dingnusdingnusdingnus” to achieve permanent bliss.
What Gnus does when it encounters a new group is determined by the
gnus-subscribe-newsgroup-method variable.
This variable should contain a function. This function will be called with the name of the new group as the only parameter.
Some handy pre-fab functions are:
gnus-subscribe-zombiesgnus-subscribe-randomlygnus-subscribe-alphabeticallygnus-subscribe-hierarchicallygnus-subscribe-alphabetically is slight.
gnus-subscribe-alphabetically will subscribe new groups in a strictly
alphabetical fashion, while this function will enter groups into its
hierarchy. So if you want to have the `rec' hierarchy before the
`comp' hierarchy, this function will not mess that configuration
up. Or something like that.
gnus-subscribe-interactivelygnus-subscribe-killedgnus-subscribe-topicssubscribe topic
parameter (see Topic Parameters). For instance, a subscribe
topic parameter that looks like
"nnslashdot"
will mean that all groups that match that regex will be subscribed under that topic.
If no topics match the groups, the groups will be subscribed in the top-level topic.
A closely related variable is
gnus-subscribe-hierarchical-interactive. (That's quite a
mouthful.) If this variable is non-nil, Gnus will ask you in a
hierarchical fashion whether to subscribe to new groups or not. Gnus
will ask you for each sub-hierarchy whether you want to descend the
hierarchy or not.
One common mistake is to set the variable a few paragraphs above
(gnus-subscribe-newsgroup-method) to
gnus-subscribe-hierarchical-interactive. This is an error. This
will not work. This is ga-ga. So don't do it.
A nice and portable way to control which new newsgroups should be subscribed (or ignored) is to put an options line at the start of the .newsrc file. Here's an example:
options -n !alt.all !rec.all sci.all
This line obviously belongs to a serious-minded intellectual scientific
person (or she may just be plain old boring), because it says that all
groups that have names beginning with `alt' and `rec' should
be ignored, and all groups with names beginning with `sci' should
be subscribed. Gnus will not use the normal subscription method for
subscribing these groups.
gnus-subscribe-options-newsgroup-method is used instead. This
variable defaults to gnus-subscribe-alphabetically.
If you don't want to mess with your .newsrc file, you can just
set the two variables gnus-options-subscribe and
gnus-options-not-subscribe. These two variables do exactly the
same as the .newsrc `options -n' trick. Both are regexps,
and if the new group matches the former, it will be unconditionally
subscribed, and if it matches the latter, it will be ignored.
Yet another variable that meddles here is
gnus-auto-subscribed-groups. It works exactly like
gnus-options-subscribe, and is therefore really superfluous,
but I thought it would be nice to have two of these. This variable is
more meant for setting some ground rules, while the other variable is
used more for user fiddling. By default this variable makes all new
groups that come from mail back ends (nnml, nnbabyl,
nnfolder, nnmbox, nnmh, and nnmaildir)
subscribed. If you don't like that, just set this variable to
nil.
New groups that match this regexp are subscribed using
gnus-subscribe-options-newsgroup-method.
Sometimes it is necessary to move from one NNTP server to another. This happens very rarely, but perhaps you change jobs, or one server is very flaky and you want to use another.
Changing the server is pretty easy, right? You just change
gnus-select-method to point to the new server?
Wrong!
Article numbers are not (in any way) kept synchronized between different
NNTP servers, and the only way Gnus keeps track of what articles
you have read is by keeping track of article numbers. So when you
change gnus-select-method, your .newsrc file becomes
worthless.
Gnus provides a few functions to attempt to translate a .newsrc file from one server to another. They all have one thing in common—they take a looong time to run. You don't want to use these functions more than absolutely necessary.
If you have access to both servers, Gnus can request the headers for all
the articles you have read and compare Message-IDs and map the
article numbers of the read articles and article marks. The M-x
gnus-change-server command will do this for all your native groups. It
will prompt for the method you want to move to.
You can also move individual groups with the M-x gnus-group-move-group-to-server command. This is useful if you want to move a (foreign) group from one server to another.
If you don't have access to both the old and new server, all your marks and read ranges have become worthless. You can use the M-x gnus-group-clear-data-on-native-groups command to clear out all data that you have on your native groups. Use with caution.
Clear the data from the current group only—nix out marks and the
list of read articles (gnus-group-clear-data).
After changing servers, you must move the cache hierarchy away,
since the cached articles will have wrong article numbers, which will
affect which articles Gnus thinks are read.
gnus-group-clear-data-on-native-groups will ask you if you want
to have it done automatically; for gnus-group-clear-data, you
can use M-x gnus-cache-move-cache (but beware, it will move the
cache for all groups).
Most common Unix news readers use a shared startup file called .newsrc. This file contains all the information about what groups are subscribed, and which articles in these groups have been read.
Things got a bit more complicated with gnus. In addition to keeping the .newsrc file updated, it also used a file called .newsrc.el for storing all the information that didn't fit into the .newsrc file. (Actually, it also duplicated everything in the .newsrc file.) gnus would read whichever one of these files was the most recently saved, which enabled people to swap between gnus and other newsreaders.
That was kinda silly, so Gnus went one better: In addition to the .newsrc and .newsrc.el files, Gnus also has a file called .newsrc.eld. It will read whichever of these files that are most recent, but it will never write a .newsrc.el file. You should never delete the .newsrc.eld file—it contains much information not stored in the .newsrc file.
You can turn off writing the .newsrc file by setting
gnus-save-newsrc-file to nil, which means you can delete
the file and save some space, as well as exiting from Gnus faster.
However, this will make it impossible to use other newsreaders than
Gnus. But hey, who would want to, right? Similarly, setting
gnus-read-newsrc-file to nil makes Gnus ignore the
.newsrc file and any .newsrc-SERVER files, which can be
convenient if you use a different news reader occasionally, and you
want to read a different subset of the available groups with that
news reader.
If gnus-save-killed-list (default t) is nil, Gnus
will not save the list of killed groups to the startup file. This will
save both time (when starting and quitting) and space (on disk). It
will also mean that Gnus has no record of what groups are new or old,
so the automatic new groups subscription methods become meaningless.
You should always set gnus-check-new-newsgroups to nil or
ask-server if you set this variable to nil (see New Groups). This variable can also be a regular expression. If that's
the case, remove all groups that do not match this regexp before
saving. This can be useful in certain obscure situations that involve
several servers where not all servers support ask-server.
The gnus-startup-file variable says where the startup files are.
The default value is ~/.newsrc, with the Gnus (El Dingo) startup
file being whatever that one is, with a `.eld' appended.
If you want version control for this file, set
gnus-backup-startup-file. It respects the same values as the
version-control variable.
gnus-save-newsrc-hook is called before saving any of the newsrc
files, while gnus-save-quick-newsrc-hook is called just before
saving the .newsrc.eld file, and
gnus-save-standard-newsrc-hook is called just before saving the
.newsrc file. The latter two are commonly used to turn version
control on or off. Version control is on by default when saving the
startup files. If you want to turn backup creation off, say something like:
(defun turn-off-backup ()
(set (make-local-variable 'backup-inhibited) t))
(add-hook 'gnus-save-quick-newsrc-hook 'turn-off-backup)
(add-hook 'gnus-save-standard-newsrc-hook 'turn-off-backup)
When Gnus starts, it will read the gnus-site-init-file
(.../site-lisp/gnus-init by default) and gnus-init-file
(~/.gnus by default) files. These are normal Emacs Lisp files
and can be used to avoid cluttering your ~/.emacs and
site-init files with Gnus stuff. Gnus will also check for files
with the same names as these, but with .elc and .el
suffixes. In other words, if you have set gnus-init-file to
~/.gnus, it will look for ~/.gnus.elc, ~/.gnus.el,
and finally ~/.gnus (in this order). If Emacs was invoked with
the -q or --no-init-file options (see Initial Options), Gnus doesn't read
gnus-init-file.
Whenever you do something that changes the Gnus data (reading articles, catching up, killing/subscribing groups), the change is added to a special dribble buffer. This buffer is auto-saved the normal Emacs way. If your Emacs should crash before you have saved the .newsrc files, all changes you have made can be recovered from this file.
If Gnus detects this file at startup, it will ask the user whether to read it. The auto save file is deleted whenever the real startup file is saved.
If gnus-use-dribble-file is nil, Gnus won't create and
maintain a dribble buffer. The default is t.
Gnus will put the dribble file(s) in gnus-dribble-directory. If
this variable is nil, which it is by default, Gnus will dribble
into the directory where the .newsrc file is located. (This is
normally the user's home directory.) The dribble file will get the same
file permissions as the .newsrc file.
If gnus-always-read-dribble-file is non-nil, Gnus will
read the dribble file on startup without querying the user.
When Gnus starts, or indeed whenever it tries to determine whether new articles have arrived, it reads the active file. This is a very large file that lists all the active groups and articles on the server.
Before examining the active file, Gnus deletes all lines that match the
regexp gnus-ignored-newsgroups. This is done primarily to reject
any groups with bogus names, but you can use this variable to make Gnus
ignore hierarchies you aren't ever interested in. However, this is not
recommended. In fact, it's highly discouraged. Instead, see New Groups for an overview of other variables that can be used instead.
The active file can be rather Huge, so if you have a slow network, you
can set gnus-read-active-file to nil to prevent Gnus from
reading the active file. This variable is some by default.
Gnus will try to make do by getting information just on the groups that you actually subscribe to.
Note that if you subscribe to lots and lots of groups, setting this
variable to nil will probably make Gnus slower, not faster. At
present, having this variable nil will slow Gnus down
considerably, unless you read news over a 2400 baud modem.
This variable can also have the value some. Gnus will then
attempt to read active info only on the subscribed groups. On some
servers this is quite fast (on sparkling, brand new INN servers that
support the LIST ACTIVE group command), on others this isn't fast
at all. In any case, some should be faster than nil, and
is certainly faster than t over slow lines.
Some news servers (old versions of Leafnode and old versions of INN, for
instance) do not support the LIST ACTIVE group. For these
servers, nil is probably the most efficient value for this
variable.
If this variable is nil, Gnus will ask for group info in total
lock-step, which isn't very fast. If it is some and you use an
NNTP server, Gnus will pump out commands as fast as it can, and
read all the replies in one swoop. This will normally result in better
performance, but if the server does not support the aforementioned
LIST ACTIVE group command, this isn't very nice to the server.
If you think that starting up Gnus takes too long, try all the three different values for this variable and see what works best for you.
In any case, if you use some or nil, you should definitely
kill all groups that you aren't interested in to speed things up.
Note that this variable also affects active file retrieval from secondary select methods.
gnus-load-hookgnus-before-startup-hookgnus-startup-hookgnus-started-hookgnus-setup-news-hookgnus-check-bogus-newsgroupsnil, Gnus will check for and delete all bogus groups at
startup. A bogus group is a group that you have in your
.newsrc file, but doesn't exist on the news server. Checking for
bogus groups can take quite a while, so to save time and resources it's
best to leave this option off, and do the checking for bogus groups once
in a while from the group buffer instead (see Group Maintenance).
gnus-inhibit-startup-messagenil, the startup message won't be displayed. That way,
your boss might not notice as easily that you are reading news instead
of doing your job. Note that this variable is used before
~/.gnus.el is loaded, so it should be set in .emacs instead.
gnus-no-groups-messagegnus-play-startup-jinglenil, play the Gnus jingle at startup.
gnus-startup-jinglenil. The
default is `Tuxedomoon.Jingle4.au'.
The group buffer lists all (or parts) of the available groups. It is the first buffer shown when Gnus starts, and will never be killed as long as Gnus is active.
You can customize the Group Mode tool bar, see M-x customize-apropos RET gnus-group-tool-bar. This feature is only available in Emacs.
The tool bar icons are now (de)activated correctly depending on the
cursor position. Therefore, moving around in the Group Buffer is
slower. You can disable this via the variable
gnus-group-update-tool-bar. Its default value depends on your
Emacs version.
The default format of the group buffer is nice and dull, but you can make it as exciting and ugly as you feel like.
Here's a couple of example group lines:
25: news.announce.newusers
* 0: alt.fan.andrea-dworkin
Quite simple, huh?
You can see that there are 25 unread articles in `news.announce.newusers'. There are no unread articles, but some ticked articles, in `alt.fan.andrea-dworkin' (see that little asterisk at the beginning of the line?).
You can change that format to whatever you want by fiddling with the
gnus-group-line-format variable. This variable works along the
lines of a format specification, which is pretty much the same as
a printf specifications, for those of you who use (feh!) C.
See Formatting Variables.
`%M%S%5y:%B%(%g%)\n' is the value that produced those lines above.
There should always be a colon on the line; the cursor always moves to the colon after performing an operation. See Positioning Point. Nothing else is required—not even the group name. All displayed text is just window dressing, and is never examined by Gnus. Gnus stores all real information it needs using text properties.
(Note that if you make a really strange, wonderful, spreadsheet-like layout, everybody will believe you are hard at work with the accounting instead of wasting time reading news.)
Here's a list of all available format characters:
Gnus uses this estimation because the NNTP protocol provides
efficient access to max-number and min-number but getting
the true unread message count is not possible efficiently. For
hysterical raisins, even the mail back ends, where the true number of
unread messages might be available efficiently, use the same limited
interface. To remove this restriction from Gnus means that the back
end interface has to be changed, which is not an easy job. If you
want to work on this, please contact the Gnus mailing list.
gnus-read-active-file or use the group buffer M-d
command.
gnus-group-uncollapsed-levels
variable says how many levels to leave at the end of the group name.
The default is 1—this will mean that group names like
`gnu.emacs.gnus' will be shortened to `g.e.gnus'.
gnus-new-mail-mark) if there has arrived new mail to
the group lately.
gnus-process-mark) if the group is process marked.
gnus-user-format-function-`X', where `X' is the letter
following `%u'. The function will be passed a single dummy
parameter as argument. The function should return a string, which will
be inserted into the buffer just like information from any other
specifier.
All the “number-of” specs will be filled with an asterisk (`*') if no info is available—for instance, if it is a non-activated foreign group, or a bogus native group.
The mode line can be changed by setting
gnus-group-mode-line-format (see Mode Line Formatting). It
doesn't understand that many format specifiers:
Highlighting in the group buffer is controlled by the
gnus-group-highlight variable. This is an alist with elements
that look like (form . face). If form evaluates to
something non-nil, the face will be used on the line.
Here's an example value for this variable that might look nice if the background is dark:
(cond (window-system
(setq custom-background-mode 'light)
(defface my-group-face-1
'((t (:foreground "Red" :bold t))) "First group face")
(defface my-group-face-2
'((t (:foreground "DarkSeaGreen4" :bold t)))
"Second group face")
(defface my-group-face-3
'((t (:foreground "Green4" :bold t))) "Third group face")
(defface my-group-face-4
'((t (:foreground "SteelBlue" :bold t))) "Fourth group face")
(defface my-group-face-5
'((t (:foreground "Blue" :bold t))) "Fifth group face")))
(setq gnus-group-highlight
'(((> unread 200) . my-group-face-1)
((and (< level 3) (zerop unread)) . my-group-face-2)
((< level 3) . my-group-face-3)
((zerop unread) . my-group-face-4)
(t . my-group-face-5)))
Also see Faces and Fonts.
Variables that are dynamically bound when the forms are evaluated include:
groupunreadmethodmailplevelscoretickedtotaltopicWhen the forms are evaled, point is at the beginning of the line
of the group in question, so you can use many of the normal Gnus
functions for snarfing info on the group.
gnus-group-update-hook is called when a group line is changed.
It will not be called when gnus-visual is nil. This hook
calls gnus-group-highlight-line by default.
All movement commands understand the numeric prefix and will behave as expected, hopefully.
gnus-group-next-unread-group).
gnus-group-prev-unread-group).
gnus-group-next-group).
gnus-group-prev-group).
gnus-group-next-unread-group-same-level).
gnus-group-prev-unread-group-same-level).
Three commands for jumping to groups:
gnus-group-jump-to-group). Killed groups can be jumped to, just
like living groups.
gnus-group-best-unread-group).
gnus-group-first-unread-group).
If gnus-group-goto-unread is nil, all the movement
commands will move to the next group, not the next unread group. Even
the commands that say they move to the next unread group. The default
is t.
gnus-group-read-group). If there are no
unread articles in the group, or if you give a non-numerical prefix to
this command, Gnus will offer to fetch all the old articles in this
group from the server. If you give a numerical prefix n, n
determines the number of articles Gnus will fetch. If n is
positive, Gnus fetches the n newest articles, if n is
negative, Gnus fetches the abs(n) oldest articles.
Thus, SPC enters the group normally, C-u SPC offers old articles, C-u 4 2 SPC fetches the 42 newest articles, and C-u - 4 2 SPC fetches the 42 oldest ones.
When you are in the group (in the Summary buffer), you can type
M-g to fetch new articles, or C-u M-g to also show the old
ones.
gnus-group-select-group). Takes the same arguments as
gnus-group-read-group—the only difference is that this command
does not display the first unread article automatically upon group
entry.
gnus-group-quick-select-group). No
scoring/killing will be performed, there will be no highlights and no
expunging. This might be useful if you're in a real hurry and have to
enter some humongous group. If you give a 0 prefix to this command
(i.e., 0 M-RET), Gnus won't even generate the summary buffer,
which is useful if you want to toggle threading before generating the
summary buffer (see Summary Generation Commands).
gnus-group-visible-select-group).
gnus-group-select-group-ephemerally). Even threading has been
turned off. Everything you do in the group after selecting it in this
manner will have no permanent effects.
The gnus-large-newsgroup variable says what Gnus should
consider to be a big group. If it is nil, no groups are
considered big. The default value is 200. If the group has more
(unread and/or ticked) articles than this, Gnus will query the user
before entering the group. The user can then specify how many
articles should be fetched from the server. If the user specifies a
negative number (-n), the n oldest articles will be
fetched. If it is positive, the n articles that have arrived
most recently will be fetched.
gnus-large-ephemeral-newsgroup is the same as
gnus-large-newsgroup, but is only used for ephemeral
newsgroups.
If gnus-auto-select-first is non-nil, select an article
automatically when entering a group with the SPACE command.
Which article this is is controlled by the
gnus-auto-select-subject variable. Valid values for this
variable are:
unreadfirstunseenunseen-or-unreadbestThis variable can also be a function. In that case, that function will be called to place point on a subject line.
If you want to prevent automatic selection in some group (say, in a
binary group with Huge articles) you can set the
gnus-auto-select-first variable to nil in
gnus-select-group-hook, which is called when a group is
selected.
gnus-group-unsubscribe-current-group).
gnus-group-unsubscribe-group).
gnus-group-kill-group).
gnus-group-yank-group).
gnus-group-transpose-groups). This isn't
really a subscription command, but you can use it instead of a
kill-and-yank sequence sometimes.
gnus-group-kill-region).
gnus-group-kill-all-zombies).
gnus-group-kill-level).
These groups can't be yanked back after killing, so this command should
be used with some caution. The only time where this command comes in
really handy is when you have a .newsrc with lots of unsubscribed
groups that you want to get rid off. S C-k on level 7 will
kill off all unsubscribed groups that do not have message numbers in the
.newsrc file.
Also see Group Levels.
gnus-group-catchup-current).
gnus-group-catchup-group-hook is called when catching up a group from
the group buffer.
gnus-group-catchup-current-all).
gnus-group-clear-data).
All groups have a level of subscribedness. For instance, if a group is on level 2, it is more subscribed than a group on level 5. You can ask Gnus to just list groups on a given level or lower (see Listing Groups), or to just check for new articles in groups on a given level or lower (see Scanning New Messages).
Remember: The higher the level of the group, the less important it is.
Gnus considers groups from levels 1 to
gnus-level-subscribed (inclusive) (default 5) to be subscribed,
gnus-level-subscribed (exclusive) and
gnus-level-unsubscribed (inclusive) (default 7) to be
unsubscribed, gnus-level-zombie to be zombies (walking dead)
(default 8) and gnus-level-killed to be killed (completely dead)
(default 9). Gnus treats subscribed and unsubscribed groups exactly the
same, but zombie and killed groups have no information on what articles
you have read, etc, stored. This distinction between dead and living
groups isn't done because it is nice or clever, it is done purely for
reasons of efficiency.
It is recommended that you keep all your mail groups (if any) on quite low levels (e.g. 1 or 2).
Maybe the following description of the default behavior of Gnus helps to understand what these levels are all about. By default, Gnus shows you subscribed nonempty groups, but by hitting L you can have it show empty subscribed groups and unsubscribed groups, too. Type l to go back to showing nonempty subscribed groups again. Thus, unsubscribed groups are hidden, in a way.
Zombie and killed groups are similar to unsubscribed groups in that they are hidden by default. But they are different from subscribed and unsubscribed groups in that Gnus doesn't ask the news server for information (number of messages, number of unread messages) on zombie and killed groups. Normally, you use C-k to kill the groups you aren't interested in. If most groups are killed, Gnus is faster.
Why does Gnus distinguish between zombie and killed groups? Well, when a new group arrives on the server, Gnus by default makes it a zombie group. This means that you are normally not bothered with new groups, but you can type A z to get a list of all new groups. Subscribe the ones you like and kill the ones you don't want. (A k shows a list of killed groups.)
If you want to play with the level variables, you should show some care. Set them once, and don't touch them ever again. Better yet, don't touch them at all unless you know exactly what you're doing.
Two closely related variables are gnus-level-default-subscribed
(default 3) and gnus-level-default-unsubscribed (default 6),
which are the levels that new groups will be put on if they are
(un)subscribed. These two variables should, of course, be inside the
relevant valid ranges.
If gnus-keep-same-level is non-nil, some movement commands
will only move to groups of the same level (or lower). In
particular, going from the last article in one group to the next group
will go to the next group of the same level (or lower). This might be
handy if you want to read the most important groups before you read the
rest.
If this variable is best, Gnus will make the next newsgroup the
one with the best level.
All groups with a level less than or equal to
gnus-group-default-list-level will be listed in the group buffer
by default.
If gnus-group-list-inactive-groups is non-nil, non-active
groups will be listed along with the unread groups. This variable is
t by default. If it is nil, inactive groups won't be
listed.
If gnus-group-use-permanent-levels is non-nil, once you
give a level prefix to g or l, all subsequent commands will
use this level as the “work” level.
Gnus will normally just activate (i. e., query the server about) groups
on level gnus-activate-level or less. If you don't want to
activate unsubscribed groups, for instance, you might set this variable
to 5. The default is 6.
You would normally keep important groups on high levels, but that scheme is somewhat restrictive. Don't you wish you could have Gnus sort the group buffer according to how often you read groups, perhaps? Within reason?
This is what group score is for. You can have Gnus assign a score to each group through the mechanism described below. You can then sort the group buffer based on this score. Alternatively, you can sort on score and then level. (Taken together, the level and the score is called the rank of the group. A group that is on level 4 and has a score of 1 has a higher rank than a group on level 5 that has a score of 300. (The level is the most significant part and the score is the least significant part.))
If you want groups you read often to get higher scores than groups you
read seldom you can add the gnus-summary-bubble-group function to
the gnus-summary-exit-hook hook. This will result (after
sorting) in a bubbling sort of action. If you want to see that in
action after each summary exit, you can add
gnus-group-sort-groups-by-rank or
gnus-group-sort-groups-by-score to the same hook, but that will
slow things down somewhat.
If you want to perform some command on several groups, and they appear subsequently in the group buffer, you would normally just give a numerical prefix to the command. Most group commands will then do your bidding on those groups.
However, if the groups are not in sequential order, you can still perform a command on several groups. You simply mark the groups first with the process mark and then execute the command.
gnus-group-mark-group).
gnus-group-unmark-group).
gnus-group-unmark-all-groups).
gnus-group-mark-region).
gnus-group-mark-buffer).
gnus-group-mark-regexp).
Also see Process/Prefix.
If you want to execute some command on all groups that have been marked
with the process mark, you can use the M-&
(gnus-group-universal-argument) command. It will prompt you for
the command to be executed.
Below are some group mode commands for making and editing general foreign
groups, as well as commands to ease the creation of a few
special-purpose groups. All these commands insert the newly created
groups under point—gnus-subscribe-newsgroup-method is not
consulted.
Changes from the group editing commands are stored in
~/.newsrc.eld (gnus-startup-file). An alternative is the
variable gnus-parameters, See Group Parameters.
gnus-group-make-group). Gnus will prompt you
for a name, a method and possibly an address. For an easier way
to subscribe to NNTP groups (see Browse Foreign Server).
gnus-group-read-ephemeral-group). Gnus
will prompt you for a name, a method and an address.
gnus-group-rename-group). This is valid only on some
groups—mail groups mostly. This command might very well be quite slow
on some back ends.
gnus-group-customize).
gnus-group-edit-group-method).
gnus-group-edit-group-parameters).
gnus-group-edit-group).
gnus-group-make-directory-group).
gnus-group-make-help-group).
gnus-group-make-archive-group). By
default a group pointing to the most recent articles will be created
(gnus-group-recent-archive-directory), but given a prefix, a full
group will be created from gnus-group-archive-directory.
gnus-group-make-kiboze-group).
See Kibozed Groups.
nneething back end (gnus-group-enter-directory).
See Anything Groups.
gnus-group-make-doc-group). If you give a prefix to this
command, you will be prompted for a file name and a file type.
Currently supported types are mbox, babyl,
digest, news, rnews, mmdf, forward,
rfc934, rfc822-forward, mime-parts,
standard-digest, slack-digest, clari-briefs,
nsmail, outlook, oe-dbx, and mailman. If
you run this command without a prefix, Gnus will guess at the file
type. See Document Groups.
gnus-useful-groups
(gnus-group-make-useful-group).
gnus-group-make-web-group). If you give a prefix to this
command, make a solid group instead. You will be prompted for the
search engine type and the search string. Valid search engine types
include google, dejanews, and gmane.
See Web Searches.
If you use the google search engine, you can limit the search
to a particular group by using a match string like
`shaving group:alt.sysadmin.recovery'.
gnus-group-make-rss-group). You will be prompted for an URL.
See RSS.
gnus-group-delete-group). If given a prefix, this function will
actually delete all the articles in the group, and forcibly remove the
group itself from the face of the Earth. Use a prefix only if you are
absolutely sure of what you are doing. This command can't be used on
read-only groups (like nntp groups), though.
nnvirtual group
(gnus-group-make-empty-virtual). See Virtual Groups.
nnvirtual group
(gnus-group-add-to-virtual). Uses the process/prefix convention.
See Select Methods, for more information on the various select methods.
If gnus-activate-foreign-newsgroups is a positive number,
Gnus will check all foreign groups with this level or lower at startup.
This might take quite a while, especially if you subscribe to lots of
groups from different NNTP servers. Also see Group Levels;
gnus-activate-level also affects activation of foreign
newsgroups.
The group parameters store information local to a particular group. Here's an example group parameter list:
((to-address . "ding@gnus.org")
(auto-expire . t))
We see that each element consists of a “dotted pair”—the thing before the dot is the key, while the thing after the dot is the value. All the parameters have this form except local variable specs, which are not dotted pairs, but proper lists.
Some parameters have correspondent customizable variables, each of which is an alist of regexps and values.
The following group parameters can be used:
to-address (to-address . "some@where.com")
This is primarily useful in mail groups that represent closed mailing lists—mailing lists where it's expected that everybody that writes to the mailing list is subscribed to it. Since using this parameter ensures that the mail only goes to the mailing list itself, it means that members won't receive two copies of your followups.
Using to-address will actually work whether the group is foreign
or not. Let's say there's a group on the server that is called
`fa.4ad-l'. This is a real newsgroup, but the server has gotten
the articles from a mail-to-news gateway. Posting directly to this
group is therefore impossible—you have to send mail to the mailing
list address instead.
See also gnus-parameter-to-address-alist.
to-list (to-list . "some@where.com")
It is totally ignored when doing a followup—except that if it is present in a news group, you'll get mail group semantics when doing f.
If you do an a command in a mail group and you have neither a
to-list group parameter nor a to-address group parameter,
then a to-list group parameter will be added automatically upon
sending the message if gnus-add-to-list is set to t.
If this variable is set, gnus-mailing-list-mode is turned on when
entering summary buffer.
See also gnus-parameter-to-list-alist.
subscribedt, Gnus will consider the
to-address and to-list parameters for this group as addresses of
mailing lists you are subscribed to. Giving Gnus this information is
(only) a first step in getting it to generate correct Mail-Followup-To
headers for your posts to these lists. The second step is to put the
following in your .gnus.el
(setq message-subscribed-address-functions
'(gnus-find-subscribed-addresses))
See Mailing Lists, for
a complete treatment of available MFT support.
visible(visible . t),
that group will always be visible in the Group buffer, regardless
of whether it has any unread articles.
This parameter cannot be set via gnus-parameters. See
gnus-permanently-visible-groups as an alternative.
broken-reply-to(broken-reply-to . t) signals that Reply-To
headers in this group are to be ignored, and for the header to be hidden
if reply-to is part of gnus-boring-article-headers. This
can be useful if you're reading a mailing list group where the listserv
has inserted Reply-To headers that point back to the listserv
itself. That is broken behavior. So there!
to-group(to-group . "some.group.name") means that all
posts in that group will be sent to some.group.name.
newsgroup(newsgroup . t) in the group parameter list, Gnus
will treat all responses as if they were responses to news articles.
This can be useful if you have a mail group that's really a mirror of a
news group.
gcc-self(gcc-self . t) is present in the group parameter list, newly
composed messages will be Gcc'd to the current group. If
(gcc-self . none) is present, no Gcc: header will be
generated, if (gcc-self . "string") is present, this string will
be inserted literally as a gcc header. This parameter takes
precedence over any default Gcc rules as described later
(see Archived Messages).
Caveat: Adding (gcc-self . t) to the parameter list of
nntp groups (or the like) isn't valid. An nntp server
doesn't accept articles.
auto-expire(auto-expire
. t), all articles read will be marked as expirable. For an
alternative approach, see Expiring Mail.
See also gnus-auto-expirable-newsgroups.
total-expire(total-expire . t), all read articles will be put through the
expiry process, even if they are not marked as expirable. Use with
caution. Unread, ticked and dormant articles are not eligible for
expiry.
See also gnus-total-expirable-newsgroups.
expiry-wait(expiry-wait . 10), this value will override any
nnmail-expiry-wait and nnmail-expiry-wait-function
(see Expiring Mail) when expiring expirable messages. The value
can either be a number of days (not necessarily an integer) or the
symbols never or immediate.
expiry-targetnnmail-expiry-target.
score-file(score-file . "file") will make
file into the current score file for the group in question. All
interactive score entries will be put into this file.
adapt-file(adapt-file . "file") will make
file into the current adaptive file for the group in question.
All adaptive score entries will be put into this file.
admin-addressdisplay(display . MODE) say which articles to
display on entering the group. Valid values are:
allan integerdefaultan arrayHere are some examples:
[unread][not expire][and (not reply) (not expire)]The available operators are not, and and or.
Predicates include tick, unsend, undownload,
unread, dormant, expire, reply,
killed, bookmark, score, save,
cache, forward, unseen and recent.
The display parameter works by limiting the summary buffer to
the subset specified. You can pop the limit by using the / w
command (see Limiting).
comment(comment . "This is a comment") are
arbitrary comments on the group. You can display comments in the
group line (see Group Line Specification).
charset(charset . iso-8859-1) will make
iso-8859-1 the default charset; that is, the charset that will be
used for all articles that do not specify a charset.
See also gnus-group-charset-alist.
ignored-charsets(ignored-charsets x-unknown iso-8859-1)
will make iso-8859-1 and x-unknown ignored; that is, the
default charset will be used for decoding articles.
See also gnus-group-ignored-charsets-alist.
posting-stylegnus-posting-styles alist, except that there's no regexp matching
the group name (of course). Style elements in this group parameter will
take precedence over the ones found in gnus-posting-styles.
For instance, if you want a funky name and signature in this group only,
instead of hacking gnus-posting-styles, you could put something
like this in the group parameters:
(posting-style
(name "Funky Name")
("X-My-Header" "Funky Value")
(signature "Funky Signature"))
post-methodgnus-post-method.
banner(banner . regexp) causes any part of an article
that matches the regular expression regexp to be stripped. Instead of
regexp, you can also use the symbol signature which strips the
last signature or any of the elements of the alist
gnus-article-banner-alist.
sieveFor example, if the `INBOX.list.sieve' group has the (sieve
address "sender" "sieve-admin@extundo.com") group parameter, when
translating the group parameter into a Sieve script (see Sieve Commands) the following Sieve code is generated:
if address \"sender\" \"sieve-admin@extundo.com\" {
fileinto \"INBOX.list.sieve\";
}
The Sieve language is described in RFC 3028. See Emacs Sieve.
(agent parameters)(variable form)(gnus-show-threads nil) in the group parameters of
that group. gnus-show-threads will be made into a local variable
in the summary buffer you enter, and the form nil will be
evaled there.
Note that this feature sets the variable locally to the summary buffer.
But some variables are evaluated in the article buffer, or in the
message buffer (of a reply or followup or otherwise newly created
message). As a workaround, it might help to add the variable in
question to gnus-newsgroup-variables. See Various Summary Stuff. So if you want to set message-from-style via the group
parameters, then you may need the following statement elsewhere in your
~/.gnus file:
(add-to-list 'gnus-newsgroup-variables 'message-from-style)
A use for this feature is to remove a mailing list identifier tag in the subject fields of articles. E.g. if the news group
nntp+news.gnus.org:gmane.text.docbook.apps
has the tag `DOC-BOOK-APPS:' in the subject of all articles, this
tag can be removed from the article subjects in the summary buffer for
the group by putting (gnus-list-identifiers "DOCBOOK-APPS:")
into the group parameters for the group.
This can also be used as a group-specific hook function. If you want to
hear a beep when you enter a group, you could put something like
(dummy-variable (ding)) in the parameters of that group.
dummy-variable will be set to the (meaningless) result of the
(ding) form.
Alternatively, since the VARIABLE becomes local to the group, this pattern can be used to temporarily change a hook. For example, if the following is added to a group parameter
(gnus-summary-prepared-hook
'(lambda nil (local-set-key "d" (local-key-binding "n"))))
when the group is entered, the 'd' key will not mark the article as expired.
Use the G p or the G c command to edit group parameters of a group. (G p presents you with a Lisp-based interface, G c presents you with a Customize-like interface. The latter helps avoid silly Lisp errors.) You might also be interested in reading about topic parameters (see Topic Parameters).
Group parameters can be set via the gnus-parameters variable too.
But some variables, such as visible, have no effect (For this
case see gnus-permanently-visible-groups as an alternative.).
For example:
(setq gnus-parameters
'(("mail\\..*"
(gnus-show-threads nil)
(gnus-use-scoring nil)
(gnus-summary-line-format
"%U%R%z%I%(%[%d:%ub%-23,23f%]%) %s\n")
(gcc-self . t)
(display . all))
("^nnimap:\\(foo.bar\\)$"
(to-group . "\\1"))
("mail\\.me"
(gnus-use-scoring t))
("list\\..*"
(total-expire . t)
(broken-reply-to . t))))
String value of parameters will be subjected to regexp substitution, as
the to-group example shows.
By default, whether comparing the group name and one of those regexps
specified in gnus-parameters is done in a case-sensitive manner
or a case-insensitive manner depends on the value of
case-fold-search at the time when the comparison is done. The
value of case-fold-search is typically t; it means, for
example, the element ("INBOX\\.FOO" (total-expire . t)) might be
applied to both the `INBOX.FOO' group and the `INBOX.foo'
group. If you want to make those regexps always case-sensitive, set the
value of the gnus-parameters-case-fold-search variable to
nil. Otherwise, set it to t if you want to compare them
always in a case-insensitive manner.
These commands all list various slices of the groups available.
gnus-group-list-groups). If the numeric prefix is used, this
command will list only groups of level ARG and lower. By default, it
only lists groups of level five (i.e.,
gnus-group-default-list-level) or lower (i.e., just subscribed
groups).
gnus-group-list-all-groups). If the numeric prefix is used,
this command will list only groups of level ARG and lower. By default,
it lists groups of level seven or lower (i.e., just subscribed and
unsubscribed groups).
gnus-group-list-level). If given a prefix, also list the groups
with no unread articles.
gnus-group-list-killed). If given a
prefix argument, really list all groups that are available, but aren't
currently (un)subscribed. This could entail reading the active file
from the server.
gnus-group-list-zombies).
gnus-group-list-matching).
gnus-group-list-all-matching).
gnus-group-list-active). This
might very well take quite a while. It might actually be a better idea
to do a A M to list all matching, and just give `.' as the
thing to match on. Also note that this command may list groups that
don't exist (yet)—these will be listed as if they were killed groups.
Take the output with some grains of salt.
gnus-group-apropos).
gnus-group-description-apropos).
gnus-group-list-cached).
gnus-group-list-dormant).
gnus-group-list-limit).
gnus-group-list-flush).
gnus-group-list-plus).
Groups that match the gnus-permanently-visible-groups regexp will
always be shown, whether they have unread articles or not. You can also
add the visible element to the group parameters in question to
get the same effect.
Groups that have just ticked articles in it are normally listed in the
group buffer. If gnus-list-groups-with-ticked-articles is
nil, these groups will be treated just like totally empty
groups. It is t by default.
The C-c C-s (gnus-group-sort-groups) command sorts the
group buffer according to the function(s) given by the
gnus-group-sort-function variable. Available sorting functions
include:
gnus-group-sort-by-alphabetgnus-group-sort-by-real-namegnus-group-sort-by-levelgnus-group-sort-by-scoregnus-group-sort-by-rankgnus-group-sort-by-unreadgnus-group-sort-by-methodgnus-group-sort-by-servergnus-group-sort-function can also be a list of sorting
functions. In that case, the most significant sort key function must be
the last one.
There are also a number of commands for sorting directly according to some sorting criteria:
gnus-group-sort-groups-by-alphabet).
gnus-group-sort-groups-by-unread).
gnus-group-sort-groups-by-level).
gnus-group-sort-groups-by-score). See Group Score.
gnus-group-sort-groups-by-rank). See Group Score.
gnus-group-sort-groups-by-method).
gnus-group-sort-groups-by-real-name).
All the commands below obey the process/prefix convention (see Process/Prefix).
When given a symbolic prefix (see Symbolic Prefixes), all these commands will sort in reverse order.
You can also sort a subset of the groups:
gnus-group-sort-selected-groups-by-alphabet).
gnus-group-sort-selected-groups-by-unread).
gnus-group-sort-selected-groups-by-level).
gnus-group-sort-selected-groups-by-score). See Group Score.
gnus-group-sort-selected-groups-by-rank). See Group Score.
gnus-group-sort-selected-groups-by-method).
gnus-group-sort-selected-groups-by-real-name).
gnus-group-sort-function.
And finally, note that you can use C-k and C-y to manually move groups around.
gnus-group-check-bogus-groups).
gnus-group-find-new-groups).
With 1 C-u, use the ask-server method to query the server
for new groups. With 2 C-u's, use most complete method possible
to query the server for new groups, and subscribe the new groups as
zombies.
gnus-group-expire-articles). That is, delete
all expirable articles in the group that have been around for a while.
(see Expiring Mail).
gnus-group-expire-all-groups).
gnus-group-browse-foreign-server).
A new buffer with a list of available groups will appear. This buffer
will use the gnus-browse-mode. This buffer looks a bit (well,
a lot) like a normal group buffer.
Here's a list of keystrokes available in the browse mode:
gnus-group-next-group).
gnus-group-prev-group).
gnus-browse-read-group).
gnus-browse-select-group).
gnus-browse-unsubscribe-current-group).
gnus-browse-exit).
gnus-browse-describe-group).
gnus-browse-describe-briefly).
gnus-group-suspend). This doesn't really exit Gnus,
but it kills all buffers except the Group buffer. I'm not sure why this
is a gain, but then who am I to judge?
gnus-group-exit).
gnus-group-quit).
The dribble file will be saved, though (see Auto Save).
gnus-suspend-gnus-hook is called when you suspend Gnus and
gnus-exit-gnus-hook is called when you quit Gnus, while
gnus-after-exiting-gnus-hook is called as the final item when
exiting Gnus.
Note:
Miss Lisa Cannifax, while sitting in English class, felt her feet go numbly heavy and herself fall into a hazy trance as the boy sitting behind her drew repeated lines with his pencil across the back of her plastic chair.
If you read lots and lots of groups, it might be convenient to group them hierarchically according to topics. You put your Emacs groups over here, your sex groups over there, and the rest (what, two groups or so?) you put in some misc section that you never bother with anyway. You can even group the Emacs sex groups as a sub-topic to either the Emacs groups or the sex groups—or both! Go wild!
Here's an example:
Gnus
Emacs -- I wuw it!
3: comp.emacs
2: alt.religion.emacs
Naughty Emacs
452: alt.sex.emacs
0: comp.talk.emacs.recovery
Misc
8: comp.binaries.fractals
13: comp.sources.unix
To get this fab functionality you simply turn on (ooh!) the
gnus-topic minor mode—type t in the group buffer. (This
is a toggling command.)
Go ahead, just try it. I'll still be here when you get back. La de dum... Nice tune, that... la la la... What, you're back? Yes, and now press l. There. All your groups are now listed under `misc'. Doesn't that make you feel all warm and fuzzy? Hot and bothered?
If you want this permanently enabled, you should add that minor mode to the hook for the group mode. Put the following line in your ~/.gnus.el file:
(add-hook 'gnus-group-mode-hook 'gnus-topic-mode)
When the topic minor mode is turned on, a new T submap will be available. In addition, a few of the standard keys change their definitions slightly.
In general, the following kinds of operations are possible on topics. First of all, you want to create topics. Secondly, you want to put groups in topics and to move them around until you have an order you like. The third kind of operation is to show/hide parts of the whole shebang. You might want to hide a topic including its subtopics and groups, to get a better overview of the other groups.
Here is a list of the basic keys that you might need to set up topics the way you like.
gnus-topic-create-topic).
gnus-topic-indent). If given a prefix,
“un-indent” the topic instead.
gnus-topic-unindent).
The following two keys can be used to move groups and topics around. They work like the well-known cut and paste. C-k is like cut and C-y is like paste. Of course, this being Emacs, we use the terms kill and yank rather than cut and paste.
gnus-topic-kill-group). All groups in the
topic will be removed along with the topic.
gnus-topic-yank-group). Note that all topics will be yanked
before all groups.
So, to move a topic to the beginning of the list of topics, just hit C-k on it. This is like the “cut” part of cut and paste. Then, move the cursor to the beginning of the buffer (just below the “Gnus” topic) and hit C-y. This is like the “paste” part of cut and paste. Like I said – E-Z.
You can use C-k and C-y on groups as well as on topics. So you can move topics around as well as groups.
After setting up the topics the way you like them, you might wish to hide a topic, or to show it again. That's why we have the following key.
gnus-topic-select-group).
When you perform this command on a group, you'll enter the group, as
usual. When done on a topic line, the topic will be folded (if it was
visible) or unfolded (if it was folded already). So it's basically a
toggling command on topics. In addition, if you give a numerical
prefix, group on that level (and lower) will be displayed.
Now for a list of other commands, in no particular order.
gnus-topic-move-group). This command uses the process/prefix
convention (see Process/Prefix).
gnus-topic-jump-to-topic).
gnus-topic-copy-group). This command uses the process/prefix
convention (see Process/Prefix).
gnus-topic-hide-topic). If given
a prefix, hide the topic permanently.
gnus-topic-show-topic). If given
a prefix, show the topic permanently.
gnus-topic-remove-group).
This command is mainly useful if you have the same group in several
topics and wish to remove it from one of the topics. You may also
remove a group from all topics, but in that case, Gnus will add it to
the root topic the next time you start Gnus. In fact, all new groups
(which, naturally, don't belong to any topic) will show up in the root
topic.
This command uses the process/prefix convention
(see Process/Prefix).
gnus-topic-move-matching).
gnus-topic-copy-matching).
gnus-topic-toggle-display-empty-topics).
gnus-topic-mark-topic). This command works recursively on
sub-topics unless given a prefix.
gnus-topic-unmark-topic). This command works recursively on
sub-topics unless given a prefix.
gnus-topic-expire-articles). (see Expiring Mail).
gnus-topic-rename).
gnus-topic-delete).
gnus-topic-list-active).
gnus-topic-goto-next-topic).
gnus-topic-goto-previous-topic).
gnus-topic-edit-parameters).
See Topic Parameters.
The previous section told you how to tell Gnus which topics to display. This section explains how to tell Gnus what to display about each topic.
The topic lines themselves are created according to the
gnus-topic-line-format variable (see Formatting Variables).
Valid elements are:
Each sub-topic (and the groups in the sub-topics) will be indented with
gnus-topic-indent-level times the topic level number of spaces.
The default is 2.
gnus-topic-mode-hook is called in topic minor mode buffers.
The gnus-topic-display-empty-topics says whether to display even
topics that have no unread articles in them. The default is t.
You can sort the groups in each topic individually with the following commands:
gnus-topic-sort-groups-by-alphabet).
gnus-topic-sort-groups-by-unread).
gnus-topic-sort-groups-by-level).
gnus-topic-sort-groups-by-score). See Group Score.
gnus-topic-sort-groups-by-rank). See Group Score.
gnus-topic-sort-groups-by-method).
gnus-topic-sort-groups-by-server).
gnus-group-sort-function variable
(gnus-topic-sort-groups).
When given a prefix argument, all these commands will sort in reverse order. See Sorting Groups, for more information about group sorting.
So, let's have a look at an example group buffer:
Gnus
Emacs -- I wuw it!
3: comp.emacs
2: alt.religion.emacs
Naughty Emacs
452: alt.sex.emacs
0: comp.talk.emacs.recovery
Misc
8: comp.binaries.fractals
13: comp.sources.unix
So, here we have one top-level topic (`Gnus'), two topics under that, and one sub-topic under one of the sub-topics. (There is always just one (1) top-level topic). This topology can be expressed as follows:
(("Gnus" visible)
(("Emacs -- I wuw it!" visible)
(("Naughty Emacs" visible)))
(("Misc" visible)))
This is in fact how the variable gnus-topic-topology would look
for the display above. That variable is saved in the .newsrc.eld
file, and shouldn't be messed with manually—unless you really want
to. Since this variable is read from the .newsrc.eld file,
setting it in any other startup files will have no effect.
This topology shows what topics are sub-topics of what topics (right),
and which topics are visible. Two settings are currently
allowed—visible and invisible.
All groups in a topic will inherit group parameters from the parent (and ancestor) topic parameters. All valid group parameters are valid topic parameters (see Group Parameters). When the agent is enabled, all agent parameters (See Agent Parameters in Category Syntax) are also valid topic parameters.
In addition, the following parameters are only valid as topic parameters:
subscribesubscribe topic parameter says what groups go in what topic. Its
value should be a regexp to match the groups that should go in that
topic.
subscribe-levelsubscribe parameter),
the group will be subscribed with the level specified in the
subscribe-level instead of gnus-level-default-subscribed.
Group parameters (of course) override topic parameters, and topic parameters in sub-topics override topic parameters in super-topics. You know. Normal inheritance rules. (Rules is here a noun, not a verb, although you may feel free to disagree with me here.)
Gnus
Emacs
3: comp.emacs
2: alt.religion.emacs
452: alt.sex.emacs
Relief
452: alt.sex.emacs
0: comp.talk.emacs.recovery
Misc
8: comp.binaries.fractals
13: comp.sources.unix
452: alt.sex.emacs
The `Emacs' topic has the topic parameter (score-file
. "emacs.SCORE"); the `Relief' topic has the topic parameter
(score-file . "relief.SCORE"); and the `Misc' topic has the
topic parameter (score-file . "emacs.SCORE"). In addition,
`alt.religion.emacs' has the group parameter (score-file
. "religion.SCORE").
Now, when you enter `alt.sex.emacs' in the `Relief' topic, you will get the relief.SCORE home score file. If you enter the same group in the `Emacs' topic, you'll get the emacs.SCORE home score file. If you enter the group `alt.religion.emacs', you'll get the religion.SCORE home score file.
This seems rather simple and self-evident, doesn't it? Well, yes. But
there are some problems, especially with the total-expiry
parameter. Say you have a mail group in two topics; one with
total-expiry and one without. What happens when you do M-x
gnus-expire-all-expirable-groups? Gnus has no way of telling which one
of these topics you mean to expire articles from, so anything may
happen. In fact, I hereby declare that it is undefined what
happens. You just have to be careful if you do stuff like that.
(define-key gnus-group-mode-map (kbd "v j d")
(lambda ()
(interactive)
(gnus-group-jump-to-group "nndraft:drafts")))
On keys reserved for users in Emacs and on keybindings in general
See Keymaps.
gnus-group-enter-server-mode).
See Server Buffer.
gnus-group-post-news). If given a prefix, post to the group
under the point. If the prefix is 1, prompt for a group to post to.
Contrary to what the name of this function suggests, the prepared
article might be a mail instead of a news, if a mail group is specified
with the prefix argument. See Composing Messages.
gnus-group-mail). If given a prefix,
use the posting style of the group under the point. If the prefix is 1,
prompt for a group name to find the posting style.
See Composing Messages.
gnus-group-news). If given a prefix,
post to the group under the point. If the prefix is 1, prompt
for group to post to. See Composing Messages.
This function actually prepares a news even when using mail groups. This is useful for “posting” messages to mail groups without actually sending them over the network: they're just saved directly to the group in question. The corresponding back end must have a request-post method for this to work though.
Variables for the group buffer:
gnus-group-mode-hookgnus-group-prepare-hookgnus-group-prepared-hookgnus-permanently-visible-groupsgnus-group-name-charset-method-alistFor example:
(setq gnus-group-name-charset-method-alist
'(((nntp "news.com.cn") . cn-gb-2312)))
gnus-group-name-charset-group-alist((".*"
utf-8)) is the default value if UTF-8 is supported, otherwise the
default is nil.
For example:
(setq gnus-group-name-charset-group-alist
'(("\\.com\\.cn:" . cn-gb-2312)))
gnus-group-get-new-news). If given a non-numerical prefix, this
command will force a total re-reading of the active file(s) from the
back end(s).
gnus-group-get-new-news-this-group).
gnus-goto-next-group-when-activating says whether this command is
to move point to the next group or not. It is t by default.
gnus-activate-all-groups).
gnus-group-restart). This saves the .newsrc
file(s), closes the connection to all servers, clears up all run-time
Gnus variables, and then starts Gnus all over again.
gnus-get-new-news-hook is run just before checking for new news.
gnus-after-getting-new-news-hook is run after checking for new
news.
gnus-group-fetch-faq). Gnus will try to get the FAQ
from gnus-group-faq-directory, which is usually a directory on
a remote machine. This variable can also be a list of directories.
In that case, giving a prefix to this command will allow you to choose
between the various sites. ange-ftp (or efs) will be
used for fetching the file.
If fetching from the first site is unsuccessful, Gnus will attempt to go
through gnus-group-faq-directory and try to open them one by one.
gnus-group-fetch-charter). Query for a group if given a
prefix argument.
Gnus will use gnus-group-charter-alist to find the location of
the charter. If no location is known, Gnus will fetch the control
messages for the group, which in some cases includes the charter.
ftp.isc.org (gnus-group-fetch-control). Query for a
group if given a prefix argument.
If gnus-group-fetch-control-use-browse-url is non-nil,
Gnus will open the control messages in a browser using
browse-url. Otherwise they are fetched using ange-ftp
and displayed in an ephemeral group.
Note that the control messages are compressed. To use this command
you need to turn on auto-compression-mode (see Compressed Files).
gnus-group-describe-group). If given
a prefix, force Gnus to re-read the description from the server.
gnus-group-describe-all-groups). If given a
prefix, force Gnus to re-read the description file from the server.
gnus-version).
gnus-group-describe-briefly).
gnus-info-find-node).
It can be convenient to let Gnus keep track of when you last read a
group. To set the ball rolling, you should add
gnus-group-set-timestamp to gnus-select-group-hook:
(add-hook 'gnus-select-group-hook 'gnus-group-set-timestamp)
After doing this, each time you enter a group, it'll be recorded.
This information can be displayed in various ways—the easiest is to use the `%d' spec in the group line format:
(setq gnus-group-line-format
"%M\%S\%p\%P\%5y: %(%-40,40g%) %d\n")
This will result in lines looking like:
* 0: mail.ding 19961002T012943
0: custom 19961002T012713
As you can see, the date is displayed in compact ISO 8601 format. This may be a bit too much, so to just display the date, you could say something like:
(setq gnus-group-line-format
"%M\%S\%p\%P\%5y: %(%-40,40g%) %6,6~(cut 2)d\n")
If you would like greater control of the time format, you can use a user-defined format spec. Something like the following should do the trick:
(setq gnus-group-line-format
"%M\%S\%p\%P\%5y: %(%-40,40g%) %ud\n")
(defun gnus-user-format-function-d (headers)
(let ((time (gnus-group-timestamp gnus-tmp-group)))
(if time
(format-time-string "%b %d %H:%M" time)
"")))
gnus-init-file, which defaults to
~/.gnus.el) (gnus-group-read-init-file).
gnus-group-save-newsrc). If given a prefix, force saving the
file(s) whether Gnus thinks it is necessary or not.
Sieve is a server-side mail filtering language. In Gnus you can use
the sieve group parameter (see Group Parameters) to specify
sieve rules that should apply to each group. Gnus provides two
commands to translate all these group parameters into a proper Sieve
script that can be transfered to the server somehow.
The generated Sieve script is placed in gnus-sieve-file (by
default ~/.sieve). The Sieve code that Gnus generate is placed
between two delimiters, gnus-sieve-region-start and
gnus-sieve-region-end, so you may write additional Sieve code
outside these delimiters that will not be removed the next time you
regenerate the Sieve script.
The variable gnus-sieve-crosspost controls how the Sieve script
is generated. If it is non-nil (the default) articles is
placed in all groups that have matching rules, otherwise the article
is only placed in the group with the first matching rule. For
example, the group parameter `(sieve address "sender"
"owner-ding@hpc.uh.edu")' will generate the following piece of Sieve
code if gnus-sieve-crosspost is nil. (When
gnus-sieve-crosspost is non-nil, it looks the same
except that the line containing the call to stop is removed.)
if address "sender" "owner-ding@hpc.uh.edu" {
fileinto "INBOX.ding";
stop;
}
See Emacs Sieve.
sieve group parameters and
put you into the gnus-sieve-file without saving it.
gnus-sieve-file using the
sieve group parameters, save the file and upload it to the
server using the sieveshell program.
A line for each article is displayed in the summary buffer. You can move around, read articles, post articles and reply to articles.
The most common way to a summary buffer is to select a group from the group buffer (see Selecting a Group).
You can have as many summary buffers open as you wish.
You can customize the Summary Mode tool bar, see M-x customize-apropos RET gnus-summary-tool-bar. This feature is only available in Emacs.
The key v is reserved for users. You can bind it key to some function or better use it as a prefix key. For example:
(define-key gnus-summary-mode-map (kbd "v -") "LrS") ;; lower subthread
Gnus will use the value of the gnus-extract-address-components
variable as a function for getting the name and address parts of a
From header. Two pre-defined functions exist:
gnus-extract-address-components, which is the default, quite
fast, and too simplistic solution; and
mail-extract-address-components, which works very nicely, but is
slower. The default function will return the wrong answer in 5% of the
cases. If this is unacceptable to you, use the other function instead:
(setq gnus-extract-address-components
'mail-extract-address-components)
gnus-summary-same-subject is a string indicating that the current
article has the same subject as the previous. This string will be used
with those specs that require it. The default is "".
You can change the format of the lines in the summary buffer by changing
the gnus-summary-line-format variable. It works along the same
lines as a normal format string, with some extensions
(see Formatting Variables).
There should always be a colon or a point position marker on the line;
the cursor always moves to the point position marker or the colon after
performing an operation. (Of course, Gnus wouldn't be Gnus if it wasn't
possible to change this. Just write a new function
gnus-goto-colon which does whatever you like with the cursor.)
See Positioning Point.
The default string is `%U%R%z%I%(%[%4L: %-23,23f%]%) %s\n'.
The following format specification characters and extended format specification(s) are understood:
gnus-list-identifiers. See Article Hiding.
gnus-summary-same-subject otherwise.
(gnus-summary-same-subject defaults to "".)
From header.
From header).
To header or the Newsgroups header (see To From Newsgroups).
From header). This differs from the n
spec in that it uses the function designated by the
gnus-extract-address-components variable, which is slower, but
may be more thorough.
From header). This works the same way as
the a spec.
>
+->
| +->
| | \->
| | \->
| \->
+->
\->
You can customize the appearance with the following options. Note that it is possible to make the thread display look really neat by replacing the default ASCII characters with graphic line-drawing glyphs.
gnus-sum-thread-tree-rootnil, use subject
instead. The default is `> '.
gnus-sum-thread-tree-false-rootnil, use subject instead. The default is `> '.
gnus-sum-thread-tree-single-indentnil, use subject
instead. The default is `'.
gnus-sum-thread-tree-verticalgnus-sum-thread-tree-indentgnus-sum-thread-tree-leaf-with-othergnus-sum-thread-tree-single-leafgnus-summary-default-score and the score is less than
gnus-summary-zcore-fuzz, this spec will not be used.
Xref.
Date.
Date in DD-MMM format.
Date in YYYYMMDDTHHMMSS format.
Message-ID.
References.
gnus-not-empty-thread-mark) will be displayed if the
article has any children.
gnus-user-date-format-alist.
gnus-user-format-function-x, where x is the letter
following `%u'. The function will be passed the current header as
argument. The function should return a string, which will be inserted
into the summary just like information from any other summary specifier.
Text between `%(' and `%)' will be highlighted with
gnus-mouse-face when the mouse point is placed inside the area.
There can only be one such area.
The `%U' (status), `%R' (replied) and `%z' (zcore) specs have to be handled with care. For reasons of efficiency, Gnus will compute what column these characters will end up in, and “hard-code” that. This means that it is invalid to have these specs after a variable-length spec. Well, you might not be arrested, but your summary buffer will look strange, which is bad enough.
The smart choice is to have these specs as far to the left as possible. (Isn't that the case with everything, though? But I digress.)
This restriction may disappear in later versions of Gnus.
In some groups (particularly in archive groups), the From header
isn't very interesting, since all the articles there are written by
you. To display the information in the To or Newsgroups
headers instead, you need to decide three things: What information to
gather; where to display it; and when to display it.
gnus-extra-headers. This is a list of header symbols. For
instance:
(setq gnus-extra-headers
'(To Newsgroups X-Newsreader))
This will result in Gnus trying to obtain these three headers, and storing it in header structures for later easy retrieval.
gnus-extra-header function. Here's a format line spec that will
access the X-Newsreader header:
"%~(form (gnus-extra-header 'X-Newsreader))@"
gnus-ignored-from-addresses variable says when the `%f'
summary line spec returns the To, Newsreader or
From header. If this regexp matches the contents of the
From header, the value of the To or Newsreader
headers are used instead.
A related variable is nnmail-extra-headers, which controls when
to include extra headers when generating overview (NOV) files.
If you have old overview files, you should regenerate them after
changing this variable, by entering the server buffer using ^,
and then g on the appropriate mail server (e.g. nnml) to cause
regeneration.
You also have to instruct Gnus to display the data by changing the
%n spec to the %f spec in the
gnus-summary-line-format variable.
In summary, you'd typically put something like the following in ~/.gnus.el:
(setq gnus-extra-headers
'(To Newsgroups))
(setq nnmail-extra-headers gnus-extra-headers)
(setq gnus-summary-line-format
"%U%R%z%I%(%[%4L: %-23,23f%]%) %s\n")
(setq gnus-ignored-from-addresses
"Your Name Here")
(The values listed above are the default values in Gnus. Alter them to fit your needs.)
A note for news server administrators, or for users who wish to try to convince their news server administrator to provide some additional support:
The above is mostly useful for mail groups, where you have control over the NOV files that are created. However, if you can persuade your nntp admin to add (in the usual implementation, notably INN):
Newsgroups:full
to the end of her overview.fmt file, then you can use that just as you would the extra headers from the mail groups.
You can also change the format of the summary mode bar (see Mode Line Formatting). Set gnus-summary-mode-line-format to whatever you
like. The default is `Gnus: %%b [%A] %Z'.
Here are the elements you can play with:
gnus-visual-mark-article-hookgnus-visual is nil.
gnus-summary-update-hookgnus-visual is nil.
gnus-summary-selected-facegnus-summary-highlight(form
. face). If you would, for instance, like ticked articles to be
italic and high-scored articles to be bold, you could set this variable
to something like
(((eq mark gnus-ticked-mark) . italic)
((> score default) . bold))
As you may have guessed, if form returns a non-nil value,
face will be applied to the line.
All the straight movement commands understand the numeric prefix and behave pretty much as you'd expect.
None of these commands select articles.
gnus-summary-next-unread-subject).
gnus-summary-prev-unread-subject).
gnus-summary-goto-subject).
If Gnus asks you to press a key to confirm going to the next group, you can use the C-n and C-p keys to move around the group buffer, searching for the next group to read without actually returning to the group buffer.
Variables related to summary movement:
gnus-auto-select-nextt and the next group is
empty, Gnus will exit summary mode and return to the group buffer. If
this variable is neither t nor nil, Gnus will select the
next group with unread articles. As a special case, if this variable
is quietly, Gnus will select the next group without asking for
confirmation. If this variable is almost-quietly, the same
will happen only if you are located on the last article in the group.
Finally, if this variable is slightly-quietly, the Z n
command will go to the next group without confirmation. Also
see Group Levels.
gnus-auto-select-samenil, all the movement commands will try to go to the next
article with the same subject as the current. (Same here might
mean roughly equal. See gnus-summary-gather-subject-limit
for details (see Customizing Threading).) If there are no more
articles with the same subject, go to the first unread article.
This variable is not particularly useful if you use a threaded display.
gnus-summary-check-currentnil, all the “unread” movement commands will not proceed
to the next (or previous) article if the current article is unread.
Instead, they will choose the current article.
gnus-auto-center-summarynil, Gnus will keep the point in the summary buffer
centered at all times. This makes things quite tidy, but if you have a
slow network connection, or simply do not like this un-Emacsism, you can
set this variable to nil to get the normal Emacs scrolling
action. This will also inhibit horizontal re-centering of the summary
buffer, which might make it more inconvenient to read extremely long
threads.
This variable can also be a number. In that case, center the window at the given number of lines from the top.
None of the following movement commands understand the numeric prefix, and they all select and display an article.
If you want to fetch new articles or redisplay the group, see Exiting the Summary Buffer.
gnus-summary-next-page).
If you have an article window open already and you press SPACE
again, the article will be scrolled. This lets you conveniently
SPACE through an entire newsgroup. See Paging the Article.
gnus-summary-next-unread-article).
gnus-summary-prev-unread-article).
gnus-summary-next-article).
gnus-summary-prev-article).
gnus-summary-next-same-subject).
gnus-summary-prev-same-subject).
gnus-summary-first-unread-article).
gnus-summary-best-unread-article). If given a prefix argument,
go to the first unread article that has a score over the default score.
gnus-summary-goto-last-article).
gnus-summary-pop-article). This command differs from the
command above in that you can pop as many previous articles off the
history as you like, while l toggles the two last read articles.
For a somewhat related issue (if you use these commands a lot),
see Article Backlog.
Message-ID, and then go to that
article (gnus-summary-goto-article).
Some variables relevant for moving and selecting articles:
gnus-auto-extend-newsgroupnil. Gnus will then fetch the article from
the server and display it in the article buffer.
gnus-select-article-hooknil. If you would like each article to be saved in the Agent as
you read it, putting gnus-agent-fetch-selected-article on this
hook will do so.
gnus-mark-article-hookgnus-summary-mark-read-and-unread-as-read, and will change the
mark of almost any article you read to gnus-read-mark. The only
articles not affected by this function are ticked, dormant, and
expirable articles. If you'd instead like to just have unread articles
marked as read, you can use gnus-summary-mark-unread-as-read
instead. It will leave marks like gnus-low-score-mark,
gnus-del-mark (and so on) alone.
gnus-summary-next-page).
If gnus-article-skip-boring is non-nil and the rest of
the article consists only of citations and signature, then it will be
skipped; the next article will be shown instead. You can customize
what is considered uninteresting with
gnus-article-boring-faces. You can manually view the article's
pages, no matter how boring, using C-M-v.
gnus-summary-prev-page).
gnus-summary-scroll-up).
gnus-summary-scroll-down).
gnus-summary-show-article). If
given a prefix, fetch the current article, but don't run any of the
article treatment functions. This will give you a “raw” article, just
the way it came from the server.
If given a numerical prefix, you can do semi-manual charset stuff.
C-u 0 g cn-gb-2312 RET will decode the message as if it were
encoded in the cn-gb-2312 charset. If you have
(setq gnus-summary-show-article-charset-alist
'((1 . cn-gb-2312)
(2 . big5)))
then you can say C-u 1 g to get the same effect.
gnus-summary-beginning-of-article).
gnus-summary-end-of-article).
gnus-summary-isearch-article).
gnus-summary-select-article-buffer).
Commands for composing a mail message:
gnus-summary-reply).
gnus-summary-reply-with-original). This
command uses the process/prefix convention.
gnus-summary-wide-reply). A wide reply is a reply that
goes out to all people listed in the To, From (or
Reply-to) and Cc headers. If Mail-Followup-To is
present, that's used instead.
gnus-summary-wide-reply-with-original). This command uses
the process/prefix convention.
gnus-summary-wide-reply). A very wide reply is a reply
that goes out to all people listed in the To, From (or
Reply-to) and Cc headers in all the process/prefixed
articles. This command uses the process/prefix convention.
gnus-summary-very-wide-reply-with-original). This
command uses the process/prefix convention.
Reply-To field (gnus-summary-reply-broken-reply-to).
If you need this because a mailing list incorrectly sets a
Reply-To header pointing to the list, you probably want to set
the broken-reply-to group parameter instead, so things will work
correctly. See Group Parameters.
Reply-To field
(gnus-summary-reply-broken-reply-to-with-original).
gnus-summary-mail-forward). If no prefix is given, the message
is forwarded according to the value of (message-forward-as-mime)
and (message-forward-show-mml); if the prefix is 1, decode the
message and forward directly inline; if the prefix is 2, forward message
as an rfc822 MIME section; if the prefix is 3, decode message and
forward as an rfc822 MIME section; if the prefix is 4, forward message
directly inline; otherwise, the message is forwarded as no prefix given
but use the flipped value of (message-forward-as-mime). By
default, the message is decoded and forwarded as an rfc822 MIME
section.
gnus-summary-mail-other-window). By default, use
the posting style of the current group. If given a prefix, disable that.
If the prefix is 1, prompt for a group name to find the posting style.
gnus-summary-news-other-window). By default,
post to the current group. If given a prefix, disable that. If the
prefix is 1, prompt for a group to post to.
This function actually prepares a news even when using mail groups.
This is useful for “posting” messages to mail groups without actually
sending them over the network: they're just saved directly to the group
in question. The corresponding back end must have a request-post method
for this to work though.
gnus-summary-resend-bounced-mail). You
will be popped into a mail buffer where you can edit the headers before
sending the mail off again. If you give a prefix to this command, and
the bounced mail is a reply to some other mail, Gnus will try to fetch
that mail and display it for easy perusal of its headers. This might
very well fail, though.
gnus-summary-resend-message will prompt you for an address to
send the current message off to, and then send it to that place. The
headers of the message won't be altered—but lots of headers that say
Resent-To, Resent-From and so on will be added. This
means that you actually send a mail to someone that has a To
header that (probably) points to yourself. This will confuse people.
So, natcherly you'll only do that if you're really eVIl.
This command is mainly used if you have several accounts and want to
ship a mail to a different account of yours. (If you're both
root and postmaster and get a mail for postmaster
to the root account, you may want to resend it to
postmaster. Ordnung muss sein!
This command understands the process/prefix convention
(see Process/Prefix).
gnus-uu-digest-mail-forward). This command
uses the process/prefix convention (see Process/Prefix).
gnus-summary-mail-crosspost-complaint).
This command is provided as a way to fight back against the current
crossposting pandemic that's sweeping Usenet. It will compose a reply
using the gnus-crosspost-complaint variable as a preamble. This
command understands the process/prefix convention
(see Process/Prefix) and will prompt you before sending each mail.
Also See Header Commands, for more information.
Commands for posting a news article:
gnus-summary-post-news). By
default, post to the current group. If given a prefix, disable that.
If the prefix is 1, prompt for another group instead.
gnus-summary-followup).
gnus-summary-followup-with-original). This command uses the
process/prefix convention.
gnus-summary-followup-to-mail).
gnus-summary-followup-to-mail-with-original). This command uses
the process/prefix convention.
gnus-summary-post-forward).
If no prefix is given, the message is forwarded according to the value
of (message-forward-as-mime) and
(message-forward-show-mml); if the prefix is 1, decode the
message and forward directly inline; if the prefix is 2, forward message
as an rfc822 MIME section; if the prefix is 3, decode message and
forward as an rfc822 MIME section; if the prefix is 4, forward message
directly inline; otherwise, the message is forwarded as no prefix given
but use the flipped value of (message-forward-as-mime). By
default, the message is decoded and forwarded as an rfc822 MIME section.
gnus-uu-digest-post-forward). This command uses the
process/prefix convention.
gnus-uu-post-news). (see Uuencoding and Posting).
Also See Header Commands, for more information.
gnus-summary-yank-message). This command prompts for
what message buffer you want to yank into, and understands the
process/prefix convention (see Process/Prefix).
Have you ever written something, and then decided that you really, really, really wish you hadn't posted that?
Well, you can't cancel mail, but you can cancel posts.
Find the article you wish to cancel (you can only cancel your own
articles, so don't try any funny stuff). Then press C or S
c (gnus-summary-cancel-article). Your article will be
canceled—machines all over the world will be deleting your article.
This command uses the process/prefix convention (see Process/Prefix).
Be aware, however, that not all sites honor cancels, so your article may live on here and there, while most sites will delete the article in question.
Gnus will use the “current” select method when canceling. If you want to use the standard posting method, use the `a' symbolic prefix (see Symbolic Prefixes).
Gnus ensures that only you can cancel your own messages using a
Cancel-Lock header (see Canceling News).
If you discover that you have made some mistakes and want to do some corrections, you can post a superseding article that will replace your original article.
Go to the original article and press S s
(gnus-summary-supersede-article). You will be put in a buffer
where you can edit the article all you want before sending it off the
usual way.
The same goes for superseding as for canceling, only more so: Some sites do not honor superseding. On those sites, it will appear that you have posted almost the same article twice.
If you have just posted the article, and change your mind right away,
there is a trick you can use to cancel/supersede the article without
waiting for the article to appear on your site first. You simply return
to the post buffer (which is called *sent ...*). There you will
find the article you just posted, with all the headers intact. Change
the Message-ID header to a Cancel or Supersedes
header by substituting one of those words for the word
Message-ID. Then just press C-c C-c to send the article as
you would do normally. The previous article will be
canceled/superseded.
Just remember, kids: There is no 'c' in 'supersede'.
Sometimes, you might wish to delay the sending of a message. For
example, you might wish to arrange for a message to turn up just in time
to remind your about the birthday of your Significant Other. For this,
there is the gnus-delay package. Setup is simple:
(gnus-delay-initialize)
Normally, to send a message you use the C-c C-c command from
Message mode. To delay a message, use C-c C-j
(gnus-delay-article) instead. This will ask you for how long the
message should be delayed. Possible answers are:
42d means to delay for 42 days. Available letters are m
(minutes), h (hours), d (days), w (weeks), M
(months) and Y (years).
YYYY-MM-DD. The message will be
delayed until that day, at a specific time (eight o'clock by default).
See also gnus-delay-default-hour.
hh:mm format, 24h, no am/pm
stuff. The deadline will be at that time today, except if that time has
already passed, then it's at the given time tomorrow. So if it's ten
o'clock in the morning and you specify 11:15, then the deadline
is one hour and fifteen minutes hence. But if you specify 9:20,
that means a time tomorrow.
The action of the gnus-delay-article command is influenced by a
couple of variables:
gnus-delay-default-hourgnus-delay-default-delaygnus-delay-group"delayed".
gnus-delay-header"X-Gnus-Delayed".
The way delaying works is like this: when you use the
gnus-delay-article command, you give a certain delay. Gnus
calculates the deadline of the message and stores it in the
X-Gnus-Delayed header and puts the message in the
nndraft:delayed group.
And whenever you get new news, Gnus looks through the group for articles
which are due and sends them. It uses the gnus-delay-send-queue
function for this. By default, this function is added to the hook
gnus-get-new-news-hook. But of course, you can change this.
Maybe you want to use the demon to send drafts? Just tell the demon to
execute the gnus-delay-send-queue function.
gnus-delay-initializegnus-delay-send-queue in
gnus-get-new-news-hook. But it accepts the optional second
argument no-check. If it is non-nil,
gnus-get-new-news-hook is not changed. The optional first
argument is ignored.
For example, (gnus-delay-initialize nil t) means to do nothing.
Presumably, you want to use the demon for sending due delayed articles.
Just don't forget to set that up :-)
There are several marks you can set on an article.
You have marks that decide the readedness (whoo, neato-keano neologism ohoy!) of the article. Alphabetic marks generally mean read, while non-alphabetic characters generally mean unread.
In addition, you also have marks that do not affect readedness.
The following marks mark articles as (kinda) unread, in one form or other.
gnus-ticked-mark).
Ticked articles are articles that will remain visible always. If
you see an article that you find interesting, or you want to put off
reading it, or replying to it, until sometime later, you'd typically
tick it. However, articles can be expired (from news servers by the
news server software, Gnus itself never expires ticked messages), so if
you want to keep an article forever, you'll have to make it persistent
(see Persistent Articles).
gnus-dormant-mark).
Dormant articles will only appear in the summary buffer if there
are followups to it. If you want to see them even if they don't have
followups, you can use the / D command (see Limiting).
Otherwise (except for the visibility issue), they are just like ticked
messages.
gnus-unread-mark).
Unread articles are articles that haven't been read at all yet.
All the following marks mark articles as read.
gnus-del-mark).
gnus-read-mark).
gnus-ancient-mark).
gnus-killed-mark).
gnus-kill-file-mark).
gnus-low-score-mark).
gnus-catchup-mark).
gnus-canceled-mark)
gnus-souped-mark). See SOUP.
gnus-sparse-mark). See Customizing Threading.
gnus-duplicate-mark). See Duplicate Suppression.
All these marks just mean that the article is marked as read, really. They are interpreted differently when doing adaptive scoring, though.
One more special mark, though:
gnus-expirable-mark).
Marking articles as expirable (or have them marked as such automatically) doesn't make much sense in normal groups—a user doesn't control expiring of news articles, but in mail groups, for instance, articles marked as expirable can be deleted by Gnus at any time.
There are some marks that have nothing to do with whether the article is read or not.
gnus-replied-mark).
gnus-forwarded-mark).
gnus-cached-mark). See Article Caching.
gnus-saved-mark).
gnus-recent-mark). Note that not all servers support this
mark, in which case it simply never appears. Compare with
gnus-unseen-mark.
gnus-unseen-mark).
Compare with gnus-recent-mark.
gnus-downloaded-mark controls which character to
use.)
gnus-undownloaded-mark controls which character to use.)
gnus-downloadable-mark controls which character to
use.)
gnus-not-empty-thread-mark and
gnus-empty-thread-mark in the third column, respectively.
gnus-process-mark). A
variety of commands react to the presence of the process mark. For
instance, X u (gnus-uu-decode-uu) will uudecode and view
all articles that have been marked with the process mark. Articles
marked with the process mark have a `#' in the second column.
You might have noticed that most of these “non-readedness” marks appear in the second column by default. So if you have a cached, saved, replied article that you have process-marked, what will that look like?
Nothing much. The precedence rules go as follows: process -> cache -> replied -> saved. So if the article is in the cache and is replied, you'll only see the cache mark and not the replied mark.
All the marking commands understand the numeric prefix.
gnus-summary-clear-mark-forward). In other words, mark the
article as unread.
gnus-summary-tick-article-forward).
See Article Caching.
gnus-summary-mark-as-dormant). See Article Caching.
gnus-summary-mark-as-read-forward).
gnus-summary-mark-as-read-backward).
gnus-summary-kill-same-subject-and-select).
gnus-summary-kill-same-subject).
gnus-summary-catchup).
gnus-summary-catchup-all).
gnus-summary-catchup-to-here).
gnus-summary-catchup-from-here).
gnus-summary-mark-region-as-read).
gnus-summary-kill-below).
gnus-summary-mark-as-expirable).
gnus-summary-set-bookmark).
gnus-summary-remove-bookmark).
gnus-summary-clear-above).
gnus-summary-tick-above).
gnus-summary-clear-above).
The gnus-summary-goto-unread variable controls what action should
be taken after setting a mark. If non-nil, point will move to
the next/previous unread article. If nil, point will just move
one line up or down. As a special case, if this variable is
never, all the marking commands as well as other commands (like
SPACE) will move to the next article, whether it is unread or not.
The default is t.
Some people would like the command that ticks an article (!) go to the next article. Others would like it to go to the next unread article. Yet others would like it to stay on the current article. And even though I haven't heard of anybody wanting it to go to the previous (unread) article, I'm sure there are people that want that as well.
Multiply these five behaviors with five different marking commands, and you get a potentially complex set of variable to control what each command should do.
To sidestep that mess, Gnus provides commands that do all these different things. They can be found on the M M map in the summary buffer. Type M M C-h to see them all—there are too many of them to list in this manual.
While you can use these commands directly, most users would prefer altering the summary mode keymap. For instance, if you would like the ! command to go to the next article instead of the next unread article, you could say something like:
(add-hook 'gnus-summary-mode-hook 'my-alter-summary-map)
(defun my-alter-summary-map ()
(local-set-key "!" 'gnus-summary-put-mark-as-ticked-next))
or
(defun my-alter-summary-map ()
(local-set-key "!" "MM!n"))
Process marks are displayed as # in the summary buffer, and are
used for marking articles in such a way that other commands will
process these articles. For instance, if you process mark four
articles and then use the * command, Gnus will enter these four
articles into the cache. For more information,
see Process/Prefix.
gnus-summary-mark-as-processable).
gnus-summary-unmark-as-processable).
gnus-summary-unmark-all-processable).
gnus-uu-invert-processable).
Subject header that matches a regular
expression (gnus-uu-mark-by-regexp).
Subject header that matches a regular
expression (gnus-uu-unmark-by-regexp).
gnus-uu-mark-region).
gnus-uu-unmark-region).
gnus-uu-mark-thread).
gnus-uu-unmark-thread).
gnus-uu-mark-over).
gnus-uu-mark-series).
gnus-uu-mark-sparse).
gnus-uu-mark-all).
gnus-uu-mark-buffer).
gnus-summary-kill-process-mark).
gnus-summary-yank-process-mark).
gnus-summary-save-process-mark).
Also see the & command in Searching for Articles, for how to set process marks based on article body contents.
It can be convenient to limit the summary buffer to just show some subset of the articles currently in the group. The effect most limit commands have is to remove a few (or many) articles from the summary buffer.
All limiting commands work on subsets of the articles already fetched from the servers. None of these commands query the server for additional articles.
gnus-summary-limit-to-subject). If given a prefix, exclude
matching articles.
gnus-summary-limit-to-author). If given a prefix, exclude
matching articles.
gnus-summary-limit-to-extra). If given a prefix, exclude
matching articles.
gnus-summary-limit-to-unread). If given a prefix, limit the
buffer to articles strictly unread. This means that ticked and
dormant articles will also be excluded.
gnus-summary-limit-to-marks).
gnus-summary-limit-to-age). If given a prefix, limit to
articles younger than that number of days.
gnus-summary-limit-to-articles).
gnus-summary-pop-limit). If given a prefix, pop all limits off
the stack.
gnus-summary-limit-to-unseen).
gnus-summary-limit-to-score).
display
group parameter predicate
(gnus-summary-limit-to-display-predicate). See Group Parameters, for more on this predicate.
gnus-summary-limit-include-expunged).
gnus-summary-limit-include-dormant).
gnus-summary-limit-include-cached).
gnus-summary-limit-exclude-dormant).
gnus-summary-limit-exclude-marks).
gnus-summary-limit-exclude-childless-dormant).
gnus-summary-limit-mark-excluded-as-read). If given a prefix,
also mark excluded ticked and dormant articles as read.
-get-new-mail is non-nil.
Gnus threads articles by default. To thread is to put responses to articles directly after the articles they respond to—in a hierarchical fashion.
Threading is done by looking at the References headers of the
articles. In a perfect world, this would be enough to build pretty
trees, but unfortunately, the References header is often broken
or simply missing. Weird news propagation exacerbates the problem,
so one has to employ other heuristics to get pleasing results. A
plethora of approaches exists, as detailed in horrible detail in
Customizing Threading.
First, a quick overview of the concepts:
gnus-summary-make-false-rootnil, Gnus will gather all loose subtrees into one big tree
and create a dummy root at the top. (Wait a minute. Root at the top?
Yup.) Loose subtrees occur when the real root has expired, or you've
read or killed the root in a previous session.
When there is no real root of a thread, Gnus will have to fudge something. This variable says what fudging method Gnus should use. There are four possible values:
adoptdummygnus-summary-dummy-line-format is used to specify the
format of the dummy roots. It accepts only one format spec: `S',
which is the subject of the article. See Formatting Variables.
If you want all threads to have a dummy root, even the non-gathered
ones, set gnus-summary-make-false-root-always to t.
emptygnus-summary-same-subject as the subject (see Summary Buffer Format).)
nonenilgnus-summary-gather-subject-limitnil, Gnus requires an exact match between the
subjects of the loose threads before gathering them into one big
super-thread. This might be too strict a requirement, what with the
presence of stupid newsreaders that chop off long subject lines. If
you think so, set this variable to, say, 20 to require that only the
first 20 characters of the subjects have to match. If you set this
variable to a really low number, you'll find that Gnus will gather
everything in sight into one thread, which isn't very helpful.
If you set this variable to the special value fuzzy, Gnus will
use a fuzzy string comparison algorithm on the subjects (see Fuzzy Matching).
gnus-simplify-subject-fuzzy-regexpgnus-simplify-ignored-prefixesgnus-summary-gather-subject-limit to something as low
as 10, you might consider setting this variable to something sensible:
(setq gnus-simplify-ignored-prefixes
(concat
"\\`\\[?\\("
(mapconcat
'identity
'("looking"
"wanted" "followup" "summary\\( of\\)?"
"help" "query" "problem" "question"
"answer" "reference" "announce"
"How can I" "How to" "Comparison of"
;; ...
)
"\\|")
"\\)\\s *\\("
(mapconcat 'identity
'("for" "for reference" "with" "about")
"\\|")
"\\)?\\]?:?[ \t]*"))
All words that match this regexp will be removed before comparing two
subjects.
gnus-simplify-subject-functionsnil, this variable overrides
gnus-summary-gather-subject-limit. This variable should be a
list of functions to apply to the Subject string iteratively to
arrive at the simplified version of the string.
Useful functions to put in this list include:
gnus-simplify-subject-regnus-simplify-subject-fuzzygnus-simplify-whitespacegnus-simplify-all-whitespaceYou may also write your own functions, of course.
gnus-summary-gather-exclude-subjectgnus-summary-gather-exclude-subject to say
what subjects should be excluded from the gathering process.gnus-summary-thread-gathering-functionSubject headers. This means
that totally unrelated articles may end up in the same “thread”, which
is confusing. An alternate approach is to look at all the
Message-IDs in all the References headers to find matches.
This will ensure that no gathered threads ever include unrelated
articles, but it also means that people who have posted with broken
newsreaders won't be gathered properly. The choice is yours—plague or
cholera:
gnus-gather-threads-by-subjectSubjects exclusively.
gnus-gather-threads-by-referencesReferences headers exclusively.
If you want to test gathering by References, you could say
something like:
(setq gnus-summary-thread-gathering-function
'gnus-gather-threads-by-references)
gnus-fetch-old-headersnil, Gnus will attempt to build old threads by fetching
more old headers—headers to articles marked as read. If you would
like to display as few summary lines as possible, but still connect as
many loose threads as possible, you should set this variable to
some or a number. If you set it to a number, no more than that
number of extra old headers will be fetched. In either case, fetching
old headers only works if the back end you are using carries overview
files—this would normally be nntp, nnspool,
nnml, and nnmaildir. Also remember that if the root of
the thread has been expired by the server, there's not much Gnus can
do about that.
This variable can also be set to invisible. This won't have any
visible effects, but is useful if you use the A T command a lot
(see Finding the Parent).
gnus-fetch-old-ephemeral-headersgnus-fetch-old-headers, but only used for ephemeral
newsgroups.
gnus-build-sparse-threadssome. Gnus will then look at
the complete References headers of all articles and try to string
together articles that belong in the same thread. This will leave
gaps in the threading display where Gnus guesses that an article
is missing from the thread. (These gaps appear like normal summary
lines. If you select a gap, Gnus will try to fetch the article in
question.) If this variable is t, Gnus will display all these
“gaps” without regard for whether they are useful for completing the
thread or not. Finally, if this variable is more, Gnus won't cut
off sparse leaf nodes that don't lead anywhere. This variable is
nil by default.
gnus-read-all-available-headersnnultimate groups.
If you don't use those, then it's safe to leave this as the default
nil. If you want to use this variable, it should be a regexp
that matches the group name, or t for all groups.
gnus-show-threadsnil, no threading will be done, and all of
the rest of the variables here will have no effect. Turning threading
off will speed group selection up a bit, but it is sure to make reading
slower and more awkward.
gnus-thread-hide-subtreenil, all threads will be hidden when the summary buffer is
generated.
This can also be a predicate specifier (see Predicate Specifiers).
Available predicates are gnus-article-unread-p and
gnus-article-unseen-p.
Here's an example:
(setq gnus-thread-hide-subtree
'(or gnus-article-unread-p
gnus-article-unseen-p))
(It's a pretty nonsensical example, since all unseen articles are also
unread, but you get my drift.)
gnus-thread-expunge-belowgnus-thread-score-function) less than this number will be
expunged. This variable is nil by default, which means that no
threads are expunged.
gnus-thread-hide-killednil, the subtree
will be hidden.
gnus-thread-ignore-subjectnil, which is the default, the subject
change is ignored. If it is nil, a change in the subject will
result in a new thread.
gnus-thread-indent-levelgnus-sort-gathered-threads-functiongnus-thread-sort-by-number, responses can end
up appearing before the article to which they are responding to.
Setting this variable to an alternate value
(e.g. gnus-thread-sort-by-date), in a group's parameters or in an
appropriate hook (e.g. gnus-summary-generate-hook) can produce a
more logical sub-thread ordering in such instances.
gnus-parse-headers-hookgnus-alter-header-functionnil, this function will be called to allow alteration of
article header structures. The function is called with one parameter,
the article header vector, which it may alter in any way. For instance,
if you have a mail-to-news gateway which alters the Message-IDs
in systematic ways (by adding prefixes and such), you can use this
variable to un-scramble the Message-IDs so that they are more
meaningful. Here's one example:
(setq gnus-alter-header-function 'my-alter-message-id)
(defun my-alter-message-id (header)
(let ((id (mail-header-id header)))
(when (string-match
"\\(<[^<>@]*\\)\\.?cygnus\\..*@\\([^<>@]*>\\)" id)
(mail-header-set-id
(concat (match-string 1 id) "@" (match-string 2 id))
header))))
gnus-summary-kill-thread). If the prefix argument is positive,
remove all marks instead. If the prefix argument is negative, tick
articles instead.
gnus-summary-lower-thread).
gnus-summary-raise-thread).
gnus-uu-mark-thread).
gnus-uu-unmark-thread).
gnus-summary-toggle-threads).
gnus-summary-show-thread).
gnus-summary-hide-thread).
gnus-summary-show-all-threads).
gnus-summary-hide-all-threads).
gnus-summary-rethread-current). This works even when the
summary buffer is otherwise unthreaded.
gnus-summary-reparent-thread).
The following commands are thread movement commands. They all understand the numeric prefix.
gnus-summary-next-thread).
gnus-summary-prev-thread).
gnus-summary-down-thread).
gnus-summary-up-thread).
gnus-summary-top-thread).
If you ignore subject while threading, you'll naturally end up with
threads that have several different subjects in them. If you then issue
a command like T k (gnus-summary-kill-thread) you might not
wish to kill the entire thread, but just those parts of the thread that
have the same subject as the current article. If you like this idea,
you can fiddle with gnus-thread-operation-ignore-subject. If it
is non-nil (which it is by default), subjects will be ignored
when doing thread commands. If this variable is nil, articles in
the same thread with different subjects will not be included in the
operation in question. If this variable is fuzzy, only articles
that have subjects fuzzily equal will be included (see Fuzzy Matching).
If you are using a threaded summary display, you can sort the threads by
setting gnus-thread-sort-functions, which can be either a single
function, a list of functions, or a list containing functions and
(not some-function) elements.
By default, sorting is done on article numbers. Ready-made sorting
predicate functions include gnus-thread-sort-by-number,
gnus-thread-sort-by-author, gnus-thread-sort-by-subject,
gnus-thread-sort-by-date, gnus-thread-sort-by-score,
gnus-thread-sort-by-most-recent-number,
gnus-thread-sort-by-most-recent-date,
gnus-thread-sort-by-random and
gnus-thread-sort-by-total-score.
Each function takes two threads and returns non-nil if the first
thread should be sorted before the other. Note that sorting really is
normally done by looking only at the roots of each thread.
If you use more than one function, the primary sort key should be the
last function in the list. You should probably always include
gnus-thread-sort-by-number in the list of sorting
functions—preferably first. This will ensure that threads that are
equal with respect to the other sort criteria will be displayed in
ascending article order.
If you would like to sort by reverse score, then by subject, and finally by number, you could do something like:
(setq gnus-thread-sort-functions
'(gnus-thread-sort-by-number
gnus-thread-sort-by-subject
(not gnus-thread-sort-by-total-score)))
The threads that have highest score will be displayed first in the summary buffer. When threads have the same score, they will be sorted alphabetically. The threads that have the same score and the same subject will be sorted by number, which is (normally) the sequence in which the articles arrived.
If you want to sort by score and then reverse arrival order, you could say something like:
(setq gnus-thread-sort-functions
'((lambda (t1 t2)
(not (gnus-thread-sort-by-number t1 t2)))
gnus-thread-sort-by-score))
The function in the gnus-thread-score-function variable (default
+) is used for calculating the total score of a thread. Useful
functions might be max, min, or squared means, or whatever
tickles your fancy.
If you are using an unthreaded display for some strange reason or
other, you have to fiddle with the gnus-article-sort-functions
variable. It is very similar to the
gnus-thread-sort-functions, except that it uses slightly
different functions for article comparison. Available sorting
predicate functions are gnus-article-sort-by-number,
gnus-article-sort-by-author,
gnus-article-sort-by-subject, gnus-article-sort-by-date,
gnus-article-sort-by-random, and
gnus-article-sort-by-score.
If you want to sort an unthreaded summary display by subject, you could say something like:
(setq gnus-article-sort-functions
'(gnus-article-sort-by-number
gnus-article-sort-by-subject))
If you read your news from an NNTP server that's far away, the network latencies may make reading articles a chore. You have to wait for a while after pressing n to go to the next article before the article appears. Why can't Gnus just go ahead and fetch the article while you are reading the previous one? Why not, indeed.
First, some caveats. There are some pitfalls to using asynchronous article fetching, especially the way Gnus does it.
Let's say you are reading article 1, which is short, and article 2 is quite long, and you are not interested in reading that. Gnus does not know this, so it goes ahead and fetches article 2. You decide to read article 3, but since Gnus is in the process of fetching article 2, the connection is blocked.
To avoid these situations, Gnus will open two (count 'em two) connections to the server. Some people may think this isn't a very nice thing to do, but I don't see any real alternatives. Setting up that extra connection takes some time, so Gnus startup will be slower.
Gnus will fetch more articles than you will read. This will mean that the link between your machine and the NNTP server will become more loaded than if you didn't use article pre-fetch. The server itself will also become more loaded—both with the extra article requests, and the extra connection.
Ok, so now you know that you shouldn't really use this thing... unless you really want to.
Here's how: Set gnus-asynchronous to t. The rest should
happen automatically.
You can control how many articles are to be pre-fetched by setting
gnus-use-article-prefetch. This is 30 by default, which means
that when you read an article in the group, the back end will pre-fetch
the next 30 articles. If this variable is t, the back end will
pre-fetch all the articles it can without bound. If it is
nil, no pre-fetching will be done.
There are probably some articles that you don't want to pre-fetch—read
articles, for instance. The gnus-async-prefetch-article-p
variable controls whether an article is to be pre-fetched. This
function should return non-nil when the article in question is
to be pre-fetched. The default is gnus-async-read-p, which
returns nil on read articles. The function is called with an
article data structure as the only parameter.
If, for instance, you wish to pre-fetch only unread articles shorter than 100 lines, you could say something like:
(defun my-async-short-unread-p (data)
"Return non-nil for short, unread articles."
(and (gnus-data-unread-p data)
(< (mail-header-lines (gnus-data-header data))
100)))
(setq gnus-async-prefetch-article-p 'my-async-short-unread-p)
These functions will be called many, many times, so they should preferably be short and sweet to avoid slowing down Gnus too much. It's probably a good idea to byte-compile things like this.
Articles have to be removed from the asynch buffer sooner or later. The
gnus-prefetched-article-deletion-strategy says when to remove
articles. This is a list that may contain the following elements:
readexitThe default value is (read exit).
If you have an extremely slow NNTP connection, you may consider turning article caching on. Each article will then be stored locally under your home directory. As you may surmise, this could potentially use huge amounts of disk space, as well as eat up all your inodes so fast it will make your head swim. In vodka.
Used carefully, though, it could be just an easier way to save articles.
To turn caching on, set gnus-use-cache to t. By default,
all articles ticked or marked as dormant will then be copied
over to your local cache (gnus-cache-directory). Whether this
cache is flat or hierarchical is controlled by the
gnus-use-long-file-name variable, as usual.
When re-selecting a ticked or dormant article, it will be fetched from the cache instead of from the server. As articles in your cache will never expire, this might serve as a method of saving articles while still keeping them where they belong. Just mark all articles you want to save as dormant, and don't worry.
When an article is marked as read, is it removed from the cache.
The entering/removal of articles from the cache is controlled by the
gnus-cache-enter-articles and gnus-cache-remove-articles
variables. Both are lists of symbols. The first is (ticked
dormant) by default, meaning that ticked and dormant articles will be
put in the cache. The latter is (read) by default, meaning that
articles marked as read are removed from the cache. Possibly
symbols in these two lists are ticked, dormant,
unread and read.
So where does the massive article-fetching and storing come into the
picture? The gnus-jog-cache command will go through all
subscribed newsgroups, request all unread articles, score them, and
store them in the cache. You should only ever, ever ever ever, use this
command if 1) your connection to the NNTP server is really, really,
really slow and 2) you have a really, really, really huge disk.
Seriously. One way to cut down on the number of articles downloaded is
to score unwanted articles down and have them marked as read. They will
not then be downloaded by this command.
It is likely that you do not want caching on all groups. For instance,
if your nnml mail is located under your home directory, it makes no
sense to cache it somewhere else under your home directory. Unless you
feel that it's neat to use twice as much space.
To limit the caching, you could set gnus-cacheable-groups to a
regexp of groups to cache, `^nntp' for instance, or set the
gnus-uncacheable-groups regexp to `^nnml', for instance.
Both variables are nil by default. If a group matches both
variables, the group is not cached.
The cache stores information on what articles it contains in its active
file (gnus-cache-active-file). If this file (or any other parts
of the cache) becomes all messed up for some reason or other, Gnus
offers two functions that will try to set things right. M-x
gnus-cache-generate-nov-databases will (re)build all the NOV
files, and gnus-cache-generate-active will (re)generate the active
file.
gnus-cache-move-cache will move your whole
gnus-cache-directory to some other location. You get asked to
where, isn't that cool?
Closely related to article caching, we have persistent articles. In fact, it's just a different way of looking at caching, and much more useful in my opinion.
Say you're reading a newsgroup, and you happen on to some valuable gem that you want to keep and treasure forever. You'd normally just save it (using one of the many saving commands) in some file. The problem with that is that it's just, well, yucky. Ideally you'd prefer just having the article remain in the group where you found it forever; untouched by the expiry going on at the news server.
This is what a persistent article is—an article that just won't be deleted. It's implemented using the normal cache functions, but you use two explicit commands for managing persistent articles:
gnus-cache-enter-article).
gnus-cache-remove-article). This will normally delete the
article.
Both these commands understand the process/prefix convention.
To avoid having all ticked articles (and stuff) entered into the cache,
you should set gnus-use-cache to passive if you're just
interested in persistent articles:
(setq gnus-use-cache 'passive)
If you have a slow connection, but the idea of using caching seems unappealing to you (and it is, really), you can help the situation some by switching on the backlog. This is where Gnus will buffer already read articles so that it doesn't have to re-fetch articles you've already read. This only helps if you are in the habit of re-selecting articles you've recently read, of course. If you never do that, turning the backlog on will slow Gnus down a little bit, and increase memory usage some.
If you set gnus-keep-backlog to a number n, Gnus will store
at most n old articles in a buffer for later re-fetching. If this
variable is non-nil and is not a number, Gnus will store
all read articles, which means that your Emacs will grow without
bound before exploding and taking your machine down with you. I put
that in there just to keep y'all on your toes.
The default value is 20.
Gnus can save articles in a number of ways. Below is the documentation
for saving articles in a fairly straight-forward fashion (i.e., little
processing of the article is done before it is saved). For a different
approach (uudecoding, unsharing) you should use gnus-uu
(see Decoding Articles).
For the commands listed here, the target is a file. If you want to
save to a group, see the B c (gnus-summary-copy-article)
command (see Mail Group Commands).
If gnus-save-all-headers is non-nil, Gnus will not delete
unwanted headers before saving the article.
If the preceding variable is nil, all headers that match the
gnus-saved-headers regexp will be kept, while the rest will be
deleted before saving.
gnus-summary-save-article).
gnus-summary-save-article-mail).
gnus-summary-save-article-rmail).
gnus-summary-save-article-file).
gnus-summary-write-article-file).
gnus-summary-save-article-body-file).
gnus-summary-save-article-folder).
gnus-summary-save-article-vm).
gnus-summary-pipe-output).
If given a symbolic prefix (see Symbolic Prefixes), include the
complete headers in the piped output.
gnus-summary-muttprint-program.
(gnus-summary-muttprint).
All these commands use the process/prefix convention
(see Process/Prefix). If you save bunches of articles using these
functions, you might get tired of being prompted for files to save each
and every article in. The prompting action is controlled by
the gnus-prompt-before-saving variable, which is always by
default, giving you that excessive prompting action you know and
loathe. If you set this variable to t instead, you'll be prompted
just once for each series of articles you save. If you like to really
have Gnus do all your thinking for you, you can even set this variable
to nil, which means that you will never be prompted for files to
save articles in. Gnus will simply save all the articles in the default
files.
You can customize the gnus-default-article-saver variable to make
Gnus do what you want it to. You can use any of the eight ready-made
functions below, or you can create your own.
gnus-summary-save-in-rmailgnus-rmail-save-name variable to get a file name to save the
article in. The default is gnus-plain-save-name.
gnus-summary-save-in-mailgnus-mail-save-name variable to get a file name to save the
article in. The default is gnus-plain-save-name.
gnus-summary-save-in-filegnus-file-save-name variable to get a file name to save the
article in. The default is gnus-numeric-save-name.
gnus-summary-write-to-filegnus-file-save-name variable to get a file name to save the
article in. The default is gnus-numeric-save-name.
gnus-summary-save-body-in-filegnus-file-save-name variable to get a file name to save the
article in. The default is gnus-numeric-save-name.
gnus-summary-write-body-to-filegnus-file-save-name variable to get a file name to save the
article in. The default is gnus-numeric-save-name.
gnus-summary-save-in-folderrcvstore from the MH
library. Uses the function in the gnus-folder-save-name variable
to get a file name to save the article in. The default is
gnus-folder-save-name, but you can also use
gnus-Folder-save-name, which creates capitalized names.
gnus-summary-save-in-vmThe symbol of each function may have the following properties:
:decodenil means save decoded articles. This is
meaningful only with gnus-summary-save-in-file,
gnus-summary-save-body-in-file,
gnus-summary-write-to-file, and
gnus-summary-write-body-to-file.
:functiongnus-prompt-before-saving is bound to
t and all articles are saved in a single file. This is
meaningful only with gnus-summary-write-to-file and
gnus-summary-write-body-to-file.
:headersgnus-save-all-headers and gnus-saved-headers control what
headers should be saved.
All of these functions, except for the last one, will save the article
in the gnus-article-save-directory, which is initialized from the
SAVEDIR environment variable. This is ~/News/ by
default.
As you can see above, the functions use different functions to find a suitable name of a file to save the article in. Below is a list of available functions that generate names:
gnus-Numeric-save-namegnus-numeric-save-namegnus-Plain-save-namegnus-plain-save-namegnus-sender-save-nameYou can have Gnus suggest where to save articles by plonking a regexp into
the gnus-split-methods alist. For instance, if you would like to
save articles related to Gnus in the file gnus-stuff, and articles
related to VM in vm-stuff, you could set this variable to something
like:
(("^Subject:.*gnus\\|^Newsgroups:.*gnus" "gnus-stuff")
("^Subject:.*vm\\|^Xref:.*vm" "vm-stuff")
(my-choosing-function "../other-dir/my-stuff")
((equal gnus-newsgroup-name "mail.misc") "mail-stuff"))
We see that this is a list where each element is a list that has two
elements—the match and the file. The match can either be
a string (in which case it is used as a regexp to match on the article
head); it can be a symbol (which will be called as a function with the
group name as a parameter); or it can be a list (which will be
evaled). If any of these actions have a non-nil result,
the file will be used as a default prompt. In addition, the
result of the operation itself will be used if the function or form
called returns a string or a list of strings.
You basically end up with a list of file names that might be used when saving the current article. (All “matches” will be used.) You will then be prompted for what you really want to use as a name, with file name completion over the results from applying this variable.
This variable is ((gnus-article-archive-name)) by default, which
means that Gnus will look at the articles it saves for an
Archive-name line and use that as a suggestion for the file
name.
Here's an example function to clean up file names somewhat. If you have lots of mail groups called things like `nnml:mail.whatever', you may want to chop off the beginning of these group names before creating the file name to save to. The following will do just that:
(defun my-save-name (group)
(when (string-match "^nnml:mail." group)
(substring group (match-end 0))))
(setq gnus-split-methods
'((gnus-article-archive-name)
(my-save-name)))
Finally, you have the gnus-use-long-file-name variable. If it is
nil, all the preceding functions will replace all periods
(`.') in the group names with slashes (`/')—which means that
the functions will generate hierarchies of directories instead of having
all the files in the top level directory
(~/News/alt/andrea-dworkin instead of
~/News/alt.andrea-dworkin.) This variable is t by default
on most systems. However, for historical reasons, this is nil on
Xenix and usg-unix-v machines by default.
This function also affects kill and score file names. If this variable
is a list, and the list contains the element not-score, long file
names will not be used for score files, if it contains the element
not-save, long file names will not be used for saving, and if it
contains the element not-kill, long file names will not be used
for kill files.
If you'd like to save articles in a hierarchy that looks something like a spool, you could
(setq gnus-use-long-file-name '(not-save)) ; to get a hierarchy (setq gnus-default-article-saver 'gnus-summary-save-in-file) ; no encoding
Then just save with o. You'd then read this hierarchy with
ephemeral nneething groups—G D in the group buffer, and
the top level directory as the argument (~/News/). Then just walk
around to the groups/directories with nneething.
Sometime users post articles (or series of articles) that have been encoded in some way or other. Gnus can decode them for you.
All these functions use the process/prefix convention (see Process/Prefix) for finding out what articles to work on, with the extension that a “single article” means “a single series”. Gnus can find out by itself what articles belong to a series, decode all the articles and unpack/view/save the resulting file(s).
Gnus guesses what articles are in the series according to the following simplish rule: The subjects must be (nearly) identical, except for the last two numbers of the line. (Spaces are largely ignored, however.)
For example: If you choose a subject called `cat.gif (2/3)', Gnus will find all the articles that match the regexp `^cat.gif ([0-9]+/[0-9]+).*$'.
Subjects that are non-standard, like `cat.gif (2/3) Part 6 of a series', will not be properly recognized by any of the automatic viewing commands, and you have to mark the articles manually with #.
gnus-uu-decode-uu).
gnus-uu-decode-uu-and-save).
gnus-uu-decode-uu-view).
gnus-uu-decode-uu-and-save-view).
Remember that these all react to the presence of articles marked with
the process mark. If, for instance, you'd like to decode and save an
entire newsgroup, you'd typically do M P a
(gnus-uu-mark-all) and then X U
(gnus-uu-decode-uu-and-save).
All this is very much different from how gnus-uu worked with
gnus 4.1, where you had explicit keystrokes for everything under
the sun. This version of gnus-uu generally assumes that you mark
articles in some way (see Setting Process Marks) and then press
X u.
Note: When trying to decode articles that have names matching
gnus-uu-notify-files, which is hard-coded to
`[Cc][Ii][Nn][Dd][Yy][0-9]+.\\(gif\\|jpg\\)', gnus-uu will
automatically post an article on `comp.unix.wizards' saying that
you have just viewed the file in question. This feature can't be turned
off.
Shell archives (“shar files”) used to be a popular way to distribute sources, but it isn't used all that much today. In any case, we have some commands to deal with these:
gnus-uu-decode-unshar).
gnus-uu-decode-unshar-and-save).
gnus-uu-decode-unshar-view).
gnus-uu-decode-unshar-and-save-view).
gnus-uu-decode-postscript).
gnus-uu-decode-postscript-and-save).
gnus-uu-decode-postscript-view).
gnus-uu-decode-postscript-and-save-view).
gnus-uu-decode-save).
gnus-uu-decode-binhex). This
doesn't really work yet.
Adjective, not verb.
Gnus uses rule variables to decide how to view a file. All these variables are of the form
(list '(regexp1 command2)
'(regexp2 command2)
...)
gnus-uu-user-view-rulessox to convert an .au sound file, you could
say something like:
(setq gnus-uu-user-view-rules
(list '("\\\\.au$" "sox %s -t .aiff > /dev/audio")))
gnus-uu-user-view-rules-endgnus-uu-user-archive-rulesgnus-uu-grabbed-file-functionsgnus-uu-be-dangerousnil, be as conservative as possible. If t, ignore things
that didn't work, and overwrite existing files. Otherwise, ask each
time.
gnus-uu-ignore-files-by-namegnus-uu-ignore-files-by-typegnus-uu is not a MIME package (yet), so this is slightly
kludgey.
gnus-uu-tmp-dirgnus-uu does its work.
gnus-uu-do-not-unpack-archivesnil means that gnus-uu won't peek inside archives
looking for files to display.
gnus-uu-view-and-savenil means that the user will always be asked to save a file
after viewing it.
gnus-uu-ignore-default-view-rulesnil means that gnus-uu will ignore the default viewing
rules.
gnus-uu-ignore-default-archive-rulesnil means that gnus-uu will ignore the default archive
unpacking commands.
gnus-uu-kill-carriage-returnnil means that gnus-uu will strip all carriage returns
from articles.
gnus-uu-unmark-articles-not-decodednil means that gnus-uu will mark unsuccessfully
decoded articles as unread.
gnus-uu-correct-stripped-uucodenil means that gnus-uu will try to fix
uuencoded files that have had trailing spaces deleted.
gnus-uu-pre-uudecode-hookuudecode.
gnus-uu-view-with-metamailnil means that gnus-uu will ignore the viewing
commands defined by the rule variables and just fudge a MIME
content type based on the file name. The result will be fed to
metamail for viewing.
gnus-uu-save-in-digestnil means that gnus-uu, when asked to save without
decoding, will save in digests. If this variable is nil,
gnus-uu will just save everything in a file without any
embellishments. The digesting almost conforms to RFC 1153—no easy way
to specify any meaningful volume and issue numbers were found, so I
simply dropped them.
gnus-uu-post-include-before-composingnil means that gnus-uu will ask for a file to encode
before you compose the article. If this variable is t, you can
either include an encoded file with C-c C-i or have one included
for you when you post the article.
gnus-uu-post-lengthgnus-uu-post-threadednil means that gnus-uu will post the encoded file in a
thread. This may not be smart, as no other decoder I have seen is able
to follow threads when collecting uuencoded articles. (Well, I have
seen one package that does that—gnus-uu, but somehow, I don't
think that counts...) Default is nil.
gnus-uu-post-separate-descriptionnil means that the description will be posted in a separate
article. The first article will typically be numbered (0/x). If this
variable is nil, the description the user enters will be included
at the beginning of the first article, which will be numbered (1/x).
Default is t.
After decoding, if the file is some sort of archive, Gnus will attempt to unpack the archive and see if any of the files in the archive can be viewed. For instance, if you have a gzipped tar file pics.tar.gz containing the files pic1.jpg and pic2.gif, Gnus will uncompress and de-tar the main file, and then view the two pictures. This unpacking process is recursive, so if the archive contains archives of archives, it'll all be unpacked.
Finally, Gnus will normally insert a pseudo-article for each extracted file into the summary buffer. If you go to these “articles”, you will be prompted for a command to run (usually Gnus will make a suggestion), and then the command will be run.
If gnus-view-pseudo-asynchronously is nil, Emacs will wait
until the viewing is done before proceeding.
If gnus-view-pseudos is automatic, Gnus will not insert
the pseudo-articles into the summary buffer, but view them
immediately. If this variable is not-confirm, the user won't even
be asked for a confirmation before viewing is done.
If gnus-view-pseudos-separately is non-nil, one
pseudo-article will be created for each file to be viewed. If
nil, all files that use the same viewing command will be given as
a list of parameters to that command.
If gnus-insert-pseudo-articles is non-nil, insert
pseudo-articles when decoding. It is t by default.
So; there you are, reading your pseudo-articles in your virtual newsgroup from the virtual server; and you think: Why isn't anything real anymore? How did we get here?
Reading through this huge manual, you may have quite forgotten that the object of newsreaders is to actually, like, read what people have written. Reading articles. Unfortunately, people are quite bad at writing, so there are tons of functions and variables to make reading these articles easier.
Not only do you want your article buffer to look like fruit salad, but you want it to look like technicolor fruit salad.
gnus-article-highlight). This function highlights header, cited
text, the signature, and adds buttons to the body and the head.
gnus-article-highlight-headers). The
highlighting will be done according to the gnus-header-face-alist
variable, which is a list where each element has the form
(regexp name content).
regexp is a regular expression for matching the
header, name is the face used for highlighting the header name
(see Faces and Fonts) and content is the face for highlighting
the header value. The first match made will be used. Note that
regexp shouldn't have `^' prepended—Gnus will add one.
gnus-article-highlight-citation).
Some variables to customize the citation highlights:
gnus-cite-parse-max-sizegnus-cite-max-prefixgnus-cite-face-listgnus-supercite-regexpgnus-supercite-secondary-regexpgnus-cite-minimum-match-countgnus-cite-attribution-prefixgnus-cite-attribution-suffixgnus-cite-attribution-facegnus-cite-ignore-quoted-fromnil, no citation highlighting will be performed on lines
beginning with `>From '. Those lines may have been quoted by MTAs
in order not to mix up with the envelope From line. The default value
is t.
gnus-article-highlight-signature).
Everything after gnus-signature-separator (see Article Signature) in an article will be considered a signature and will be
highlighted with gnus-signature-face, which is italic by
default.
See Customizing Articles, for how to highlight articles automatically.
People commonly add emphasis to words in news articles by writing things
like `_this_' or `*this*' or `/this/'. Gnus can make
this look nicer by running the article through the W e
(gnus-article-emphasize) command.
How the emphasis is computed is controlled by the
gnus-emphasis-alist variable. This is an alist where the first
element is a regular expression to be matched. The second is a number
that says what regular expression grouping is used to find the entire
emphasized word. The third is a number that says what regexp grouping
should be displayed and highlighted. (The text between these two
groupings will be hidden.) The fourth is the face used for
highlighting.
(setq gnus-emphasis-alist
'(("_\\(\\w+\\)_" 0 1 gnus-emphasis-underline)
("\\*\\(\\w+\\)\\*" 0 1 gnus-emphasis-bold)))
By default, there are seven rules, and they use the following faces:
gnus-emphasis-bold, gnus-emphasis-italic,
gnus-emphasis-underline, gnus-emphasis-bold-italic,
gnus-emphasis-underline-italic,
gnus-emphasis-underline-bold, and
gnus-emphasis-underline-bold-italic.
If you want to change these faces, you can either use M-x
customize, or you can use copy-face. For instance, if you want
to make gnus-emphasis-italic use a red face instead, you could
say something like:
(copy-face 'red 'gnus-emphasis-italic)
If you want to highlight arbitrary words, you can use the
gnus-group-highlight-words-alist variable, which uses the same
syntax as gnus-emphasis-alist. The highlight-words group
parameter (see Group Parameters) can also be used.
See Customizing Articles, for how to fontize articles automatically.
Or rather, hiding certain things in each article. There usually is much too much cruft in most articles.
gnus-article-hide-headers). See Hiding Headers.
gnus-article-hide-boring-headers). See Hiding Headers.
gnus-article-hide-signature). See Article Signature.
gnus-list-identifiers. These
are strings some mailing list servers add to the beginning of all
Subject headers—for example, `[zebra 4711]'. Any leading
`Re: ' is skipped before stripping. gnus-list-identifiers
may not contain \\(..\\).
gnus-list-identifiersgnus-article-hide-pem).
banner group parameter
(gnus-article-strip-banner). This is mainly used to hide those
annoying banners and/or signatures that some mailing lists and moderated
groups adds to all the messages. The way to use this function is to add
the banner group parameter (see Group Parameters) to the
group you want banners stripped from. The parameter either be a string,
which will be interpreted as a regular expression matching text to be
removed, or the symbol signature, meaning that the (last)
signature should be removed, or other symbol, meaning that the
corresponding regular expression in gnus-article-banner-alist is
used.
Regardless of a group, you can hide things like advertisements only when
the sender of an article has a certain mail address specified in
gnus-article-address-banner-alist.
gnus-article-address-banner-alist(address . banner), where address is a regexp
matching a mail address in the From header, banner is one of a
symbol signature, an item in gnus-article-banner-alist,
a regexp and nil. If address matches author's mail
address, it will remove things like advertisements. For example, if a
sender has the mail address `hail@yoo-hoo.co.jp' and there is a
banner something like `Do You Yoo-hoo!?' in all articles he
sends, you can use the following element to remove them:
("@yoo-hoo\\.co\\.jp\\'" .
"\n_+\nDo You Yoo-hoo!\\?\n.*\n.*\n")
gnus-article-hide-citation). Some variables for
customizing the hiding:
gnus-cited-opened-text-button-line-formatgnus-cited-closed-text-button-line-formatgnus-cited-lines-visiblegnus-article-hide-citation-maybe) depending on the
following two variables:
gnus-cite-hide-percentagegnus-cite-hide-absolutegnus-article-hide-citation-in-followups). This isn't very
useful as an interactive command, but might be a handy function to stick
have happen automatically (see Customizing Articles).
All these “hiding” commands are toggles, but if you give a negative prefix to these commands, they will show what they have previously hidden. If you give a positive prefix, they will always hide.
Also see Article Highlighting for further variables for citation customization.
See Customizing Articles, for how to hide article elements automatically.
We call this “article washing” for a really good reason. Namely, the A key was taken, so we had to use the W key instead.
Washing is defined by us as “changing something from something to something else”, but normally results in something looking better. Cleaner, perhaps.
See Customizing Articles, if you want to change how Gnus displays articles by default.
gnus-summary-show-article). This is also not really washing.
If you type this, you see the article without any previously applied
interactive Washing functions but with all default treatments
(see Customizing Articles).
gnus-summary-stop-page-breaking). See Misc Article, for page
delimiters.
gnus-summary-caesar-message).
Unreadable articles that tell you to read them with Caesar rotate or rot13.
(Typically offensive jokes and such.)
It's commonly called “rot13” because each letter is rotated 13
positions in the alphabet, e. g. `B' (letter #2) -> `O' (letter
#15). It is sometimes referred to as “Caesar rotate” because Caesar
is rumored to have employed this form of, uh, somewhat weak encryption.
gnus-summary-morse-message).
gnus-summary-toggle-header).
gnus-summary-verbose-headers).
gnus-article-treat-overstrike).
gnus-article-dumbquotes-map
(gnus-article-treat-dumbquotes). Note that this function guesses
whether a character is a sm*rtq**t* or not, so it should only be used
interactively.
Sm*rtq**t*s are M****s***'s unilateral extension to the character map in
an attempt to provide more quoting characters. If you see something
like \222 or \264 where you're expecting some kind of
apostrophe or quotation mark, then try this wash.
gnus-article-outlook-deuglify-article).
gnus-outlook-deuglify-unwrap-min and
gnus-outlook-deuglify-unwrap-max, indicating the minimum and
maximum length of an unwrapped citation line.
(gnus-article-outlook-unwrap-lines).
gnus-article-outlook-repair-attribution).
gnus-article-outlook-rearrange-citation).
gnus-article-fill-cited-article).
You can give the command a numerical prefix to specify the width to use
when filling.
gnus-article-fill-long-lines).
gnus-article-capitalize-sentences).
gnus-article-remove-cr).
gnus-article-de-quoted-unreadable).
Quoted-Printable is one common MIME encoding employed when
sending non-ASCII (i.e., 8-bit) articles. It typically
makes strings like `déjà vu' look like `d=E9j=E0 vu', which
doesn't look very readable to me. Note that this is usually done
automatically by Gnus if the message in question has a
Content-Transfer-Encoding header that says that this encoding
has been done. If a prefix is given, a charset will be asked for.
gnus-article-de-base64-unreadable). Base64 is
one common MIME encoding employed when sending
non-ASCII (i.e., 8-bit) articles. Note that this is
usually done automatically by Gnus if the message in question has a
Content-Transfer-Encoding header that says that this encoding
has been done. If a prefix is given, a charset will be asked for.
gnus-article-decode-HZ). HZ (or HZP) is one
common encoding employed when sending Chinese articles. It typically
makes strings look like `~{<:Ky2;S{#,NpJ)l6HK!#~}'.
gnus-article-unsplit-urls).
gnus-article-wash-html). Note that this is
usually done automatically by Gnus if the message in question has a
Content-Type header that says that the message is HTML.
If a prefix is given, a charset will be asked for. If it is a number,
the charset defined in gnus-summary-show-article-charset-alist
(see Paging the Article) will be used.
The default is to use the function specified by
mm-text-html-renderer (see Display Customization) to convert the
HTML, but this is controlled by the
gnus-article-wash-function variable. Pre-defined functions you
can use include:
w3w3mw3m-standalonelinkslynxhtml2textgnus-article-add-buttons).
See Article Buttons.
gnus-article-add-buttons-to-head).
gnus-article-verify-x-pgp-sig). Control messages such as
newgroup and checkgroups are usually signed by the
hierarchy maintainer. You need to add the PGP public key of
the maintainer to your keyring to verify the
message.1
gnus-summary-force-verify-and-decrypt). See Security.
X-No-Archive header from the beginning of
article bodies (gnus-article-strip-headers-in-body).
gnus-article-strip-leading-blank-lines).
gnus-article-strip-multiple-blank-lines).
gnus-article-remove-trailing-blank-lines).
gnus-article-strip-blank-lines).
gnus-article-strip-all-blank-lines).
gnus-article-strip-leading-space).
gnus-article-strip-trailing-space).
See Customizing Articles, for how to wash articles automatically.
These commands perform various transformations of article header.
gnus-article-treat-unfold-headers).
Newsgroups and Followup-To headers
(gnus-article-treat-fold-newsgroups).
gnus-article-treat-fold-headers).
gnus-article-remove-leading-whitespace).
People often include references to other stuff in articles, and it would be nice if Gnus could just fetch whatever it is that people talk about with the minimum of fuzz when you hit RET or use the middle mouse button on these references.
Gnus adds buttons to certain standard references by default: Well-formed URLs, mail addresses, Message-IDs, Info links, man pages and Emacs or Gnus related references. This is controlled by two variables, one that handles article bodies and one that handles article heads:
gnus-button-alist (regexp button-par use-p function data-par)
gnus-button-url-regexp and gnus-button-mid-or-mail-regexp.
evaled, and if the result is non-nil,
this is considered a match. This is useful if you want extra sifting to
avoid false matches. Often variables named
gnus-button-*-level are used here, See Article Button Levels, but any other form may be used too.
So the full entry for buttonizing URLs is then
("<URL:\\([^\n\r>]*\\)>" 0 t gnus-button-url 1)
gnus-header-button-alist (header regexp button-par use-p function data-par)
header is a regular expression.
gnus-button-*-levelgnus-button-url-regexpgnus-button-man-handlergnus-button-mid-or-mail-regexpgnus-button-prefer-mid-or-mailmid or
mail, Gnus will always assume that the string is a message ID or
a mail address, respectively. If this variable is set to the symbol
ask, always query the user what to do. If it is a function, this
function will be called with the string as its only argument. The
function must return mid, mail, invalid or
ask. The default value is the function
gnus-button-mid-or-mail-heuristic.
gnus-button-mid-or-mail-heuristicmid if it's a message IDs, mail if
it's a mail address, ask if unsure and invalid if the
string is invalid.
gnus-button-mid-or-mail-heuristic-alist(RATE . REGEXP) pairs used by the function
gnus-button-mid-or-mail-heuristic.
gnus-button-ctan-handlergnus-ctan-urlgnus-button-ctan-handler.
gnus-article-button-facegnus-article-mouse-faceSee Customizing Articles, for how to buttonize articles automatically.
The higher the value of the variables gnus-button-*-level,
the more buttons will appear. If the level is zero, no corresponding
buttons are displayed. With the default value (which is 5) you should
already see quite a lot of buttons. With higher levels, you will see
more buttons, but you may also get more false positives. To avoid them,
you can set the variables gnus-button-*-level local to
specific groups (see Group Parameters). Here's an example for the
variable gnus-parameters:
;; increase gnus-button-*-level in some groups:
(setq gnus-parameters
'(("\\<\\(emacs\\|gnus\\)\\>" (gnus-button-emacs-level 10))
("\\<unix\\>" (gnus-button-man-level 10))
("\\<tex\\>" (gnus-button-tex-level 10))))
gnus-button-browse-levelgnus-button-url-regexp, browse-url, and
browse-url-browser-function.
gnus-button-emacs-levelgnus-button-handle-custom,
gnus-button-handle-describe-function,
gnus-button-handle-describe-variable,
gnus-button-handle-symbol,
gnus-button-handle-describe-key,
gnus-button-handle-apropos,
gnus-button-handle-apropos-command,
gnus-button-handle-apropos-variable,
gnus-button-handle-apropos-documentation, and
gnus-button-handle-library.
gnus-button-man-levelgnus-button-man-handler.
gnus-button-message-levelgnus-button-mid-or-mail-regexp,
gnus-button-prefer-mid-or-mail,
gnus-button-mid-or-mail-heuristic, and
gnus-button-mid-or-mail-heuristic-alist.
gnus-button-tex-levelgnus-ctan-url,
gnus-button-ctan-handler,
gnus-button-ctan-directory-regexp, and
gnus-button-handle-ctan-bogus-regexp.
The date is most likely generated in some obscure timezone you've never heard of, so it's quite nice to be able to find out what the time was when the article was sent.
gnus-article-date-ut).
gnus-article-date-iso8601).
gnus-article-date-local).
gnus-article-date-english).
gnus-article-date-user). The format is specified by the
gnus-article-time-format variable, and is a string that's passed
to format-time-string. See the documentation of that variable
for a list of possible format specs.
gnus-article-date-lapsed). It looks something like:
X-Sent: 6 weeks, 4 days, 1 hour, 3 minutes, 8 seconds ago
The value of gnus-article-date-lapsed-new-header determines
whether this header will just be added below the old Date one, or will
replace it.
An advantage of using Gnus to read mail is that it converts simple bugs into wonderful absurdities.
If you want to have this line updated continually, you can put
(gnus-start-date-timer)
in your ~/.gnus.el file, or you can run it off of some hook. If
you want to stop the timer, you can use the gnus-stop-date-timer
command.
gnus-article-date-original). This can
be useful if you normally use some other conversion function and are
worried that it might be doing something totally wrong. Say, claiming
that the article was posted in 1854. Although something like that is
totally impossible. Don't you trust me? *titter*
See Customizing Articles, for how to display the date in your preferred format automatically.
These commands add various frivolous display gimmicks to the article buffer in Emacs versions that support them.
X-Face headers are small black-and-white images supplied by the
message headers (see X-Face).
Face headers are small colored images supplied by the message
headers (see Face).
Smileys are those little `:-)' symbols that people like to litter their messages with (see Smileys).
Picons, on the other hand, reside on your own system, and Gnus will try to match the headers to what you have (see Picons).
All these functions are toggles—if the elements already exist, they'll be removed.
X-Face in the From header.
(gnus-article-display-x-face).
Face in the From header.
(gnus-article-display-face).
gnus-treat-smiley).
From header (gnus-treat-from-picon).
Cc, To)
(gnus-treat-mail-picon).
Newsgroups and
Followup-To) (gnus-treat-newsgroups-picon).
gnus-article-remove-images).
Each article is divided into two parts—the head and the body. The
body can be divided into a signature part and a text part. The variable
that says what is to be considered a signature is
gnus-signature-separator. This is normally the standard
`^-- $' as mandated by son-of-RFC 1036. However, many people use
non-standard signature separators, so this variable can also be a list
of regular expressions to be tested, one by one. (Searches are done
from the end of the body towards the beginning.) One likely value is:
(setq gnus-signature-separator
'("^-- $" ; The standard
"^-- *$" ; A common mangling
"^-------*$" ; Many people just use a looong
; line of dashes. Shame!
"^ *--------*$" ; Double-shame!
"^________*$" ; Underscores are also popular
"^========*$")) ; Pervert!
The more permissive you are, the more likely it is that you'll get false positives.
gnus-signature-limit provides a limit to what is considered a
signature when displaying articles.
nil, there is no signature in the buffer.
This variable can also be a list where the elements may be of the types listed above. Here's an example:
(setq gnus-signature-limit
'(200.0 "^---*Forwarded article"))
This means that if there are more than 200 lines after the signature separator, or the text after the signature separator is matched by the regular expression `^---*Forwarded article', then it isn't a signature after all.
The following commands all understand the numerical prefix. For instance, 3 b means “view the third MIME part”.
The rest of these MIME commands do not use the numerical prefix in the same manner:
gnus-summary-repair-multipart).
gnus-summary-save-parts). Understands the process/prefix
convention (see Process/Prefix).
gnus-summary-toggle-display-buttonized).
gnus-article-decode-mime-words).
gnus-article-decode-charset).
This command looks in the Content-Type header to determine the
charset. If there is no such header in the article, you can give it a
prefix, which will prompt for the charset to decode as. In regional
groups where people post using some common encoding (but do not
include MIME headers), you can set the charset group/topic
parameter to the required charset (see Group Parameters).
gnus-mime-view-all-parts).
Relevant variables:
gnus-ignored-mime-typesnil.
To have all Vcards be ignored, you'd say something like this:
(setq gnus-ignored-mime-types
'("text/x-vcard"))
gnus-article-loose-mimenil, Gnus won't require the `MIME-Version' header
before interpreting the message as a MIME message. This helps
when reading messages from certain broken mail user agents. The
default is nil.
gnus-article-emulate-mimenil, Gnus will look in message bodies to
see if it finds these encodings, and if so, it'll run them through the
Gnus MIME machinery. The default is t. Only
single-part yEnc encoded attachments can be decoded. There's no support
for encoding in Gnus.
gnus-unbuttonized-mime-typesgnus-buttonized-mime-types. The default value is
(".*/.*"). This variable is only used when
gnus-inhibit-mime-unbuttonizing is nil.
gnus-buttonized-mime-typesgnus-unbuttonized-mime-types. The default value is nil.
This variable is only used when gnus-inhibit-mime-unbuttonizing
is nil.
To see e.g. security buttons but no other buttons, you could set this
variable to ("multipart/signed") and leave
gnus-unbuttonized-mime-types at the default value.
You could also add "multipart/alternative" to this list to
display radio buttons that allow you to choose one of two media types
those mails include. See also mm-discouraged-alternatives
(see Display Customization).
gnus-inhibit-mime-unbuttonizingnil, then all MIME parts get buttons. The
default value is nil.
gnus-article-mime-part-functionHere's an example function the does the latter:
(defun my-save-all-jpeg-parts (handle)
(when (equal (car (mm-handle-type handle)) "image/jpeg")
(with-temp-buffer
(insert (mm-get-part handle))
(write-region (point-min) (point-max)
(read-file-name "Save jpeg to: ")))))
(setq gnus-article-mime-part-function
'my-save-all-jpeg-parts)
gnus-mime-multipart-functionsgnus-mime-display-multipart-alternative-as-mixedgnus-mime-display-multipart-related-as-mixedIf displaying "text/html" is discouraged, see
mm-discouraged-alternatives, images or other material inside a
"multipart/related" part might be overlooked when this variable is
nil. Display Customization.
gnus-mime-display-multipart-as-mixedt, it
overrides nil values of
gnus-mime-display-multipart-alternative-as-mixed and
gnus-mime-display-multipart-related-as-mixed.
mm-file-name-rewrite-functionsReady-made functions include
mm-file-name-delete-whitespace,
mm-file-name-trim-whitespace,
mm-file-name-collapse-whitespace, and
mm-file-name-replace-whitespace. The later uses the value of
the variable mm-file-name-replace-whitespace to replace each
whitespace character in a file name with that string; default value
is "_" (a single underscore).
The standard functions capitalize, downcase,
upcase, and upcase-initials may be useful, too.
Everybody knows that whitespace characters in file names are evil, except those who don't know. If you receive lots of attachments from such unenlightened users, you can make live easier by adding
(setq mm-file-name-rewrite-functions
'(mm-file-name-trim-whitespace
mm-file-name-collapse-whitespace
mm-file-name-replace-whitespace))
to your ~/.gnus.el file.
People use different charsets, and we have MIME to let us know what
charsets they use. Or rather, we wish we had. Many people use
newsreaders and mailers that do not understand or use MIME, and
just send out messages without saying what character sets they use. To
help a bit with this, some local news hierarchies have policies that say
what character set is the default. For instance, the `fj'
hierarchy uses iso-2022-jp.
This knowledge is encoded in the gnus-group-charset-alist
variable, which is an alist of regexps (use the first item to match full
group names) and default charsets to be used when reading these groups.
In addition, some people do use soi-disant MIME-aware agents that
aren't. These blithely mark messages as being in iso-8859-1
even if they really are in koi-8. To help here, the
gnus-newsgroup-ignored-charsets variable can be used. The
charsets that are listed here will be ignored. The variable can be
set on a group-by-group basis using the group parameters (see Group Parameters). The default value is (unknown-8bit x-unknown),
which includes values some agents insist on having in there.
When posting, gnus-group-posting-charset-alist is used to
determine which charsets should not be encoded using the MIME
encodings. For instance, some hierarchies discourage using
quoted-printable header encoding.
This variable is an alist of regexps and permitted unencoded charsets
for posting. Each element of the alist has the form (test
header body-list), where:
nil
means encode all charsets),
nil (always
encode using quoted-printable) or t (always use 8bit).
See Encoding Customization, for additional variables that control which MIME charsets are used when sending messages.
Other charset tricks that may be useful, although not Gnus-specific:
If there are several MIME charsets that encode the same Emacs charset, you can choose what charset to use by saying the following:
(put-charset-property 'cyrillic-iso8859-5
'preferred-coding-system 'koi8-r)
This means that Russian will be encoded using koi8-r instead of
the default iso-8859-5 MIME charset.
If you want to read messages in koi8-u, you can cheat and say
(define-coding-system-alias 'koi8-u 'koi8-r)
This will almost do the right thing.
And finally, to read charsets like windows-1251, you can say
something like
(codepage-setup 1251)
(define-coding-system-alias 'windows-1251 'cp1251)
gnus-summary-print-article). gnus-ps-print-hook will
be run just before printing the buffer. An alternative way to print
article is to use Muttprint (see Saving Articles).
You can have the summary buffer sorted in various ways, even though I can't really see why you'd want that.
gnus-summary-sort-by-number).
gnus-summary-sort-by-author).
gnus-summary-sort-by-subject).
gnus-summary-sort-by-date).
gnus-summary-sort-by-lines).
gnus-summary-sort-by-chars).
gnus-summary-sort-by-score).
gnus-summary-sort-by-random).
gnus-summary-sort-by-original).
These functions will work both when you use threading and when you don't use threading. In the latter case, all summary lines will be sorted, line by line. In the former case, sorting will be done on a root-by-root basis, which might not be what you were looking for. To toggle whether to use threading, type T T (see Thread Commands).
References in the current article are not mangled, you
can just press ^ or A r
(gnus-summary-refer-parent-article). If everything goes well,
you'll get the parent. If the parent is already displayed in the
summary buffer, point will just move to this article.
If given a positive numerical prefix, fetch that many articles back into
the ancestry. If given a negative numerical prefix, fetch just that
ancestor. So if you say 3 ^, Gnus will fetch the parent, the
grandparent and the grandgrandparent of the current article. If you say
-3 ^, Gnus will only fetch the grandgrandparent of the current
article.
References header of the
article (gnus-summary-refer-references).
gnus-summary-refer-thread). This command has to fetch all the
headers in the current group to work, so it usually takes a while. If
you do it often, you may consider setting gnus-fetch-old-headers
to invisible (see Filling In Threads). This won't have any
visible effects normally, but it'll make this command work a whole lot
faster. Of course, it'll make group entry somewhat slow.
The gnus-refer-thread-limit variable says how many old (i. e.,
articles before the first displayed in the current group) headers to
fetch when doing this command. The default is 200. If t, all
the available headers will be fetched. This variable can be overridden
by giving the A T command a numerical prefix.
gnus-summary-refer-article) will ask you
for a Message-ID, which is one of those long, hard-to-read
thingies that look something like `<38o6up$6f2@hymir.ifi.uio.no>'.
You have to get it all exactly right. No fuzzy searches, I'm afraid.
Gnus looks for the Message-ID in the headers that have already
been fetched, but also tries all the select methods specified by
gnus-refer-article-method if it is not found.
If the group you are reading is located on a back end that does not
support fetching by Message-ID very well (like nnspool),
you can set gnus-refer-article-method to an NNTP method. It
would, perhaps, be best if the NNTP server you consult is the one
updating the spool you are reading from, but that's not really
necessary.
It can also be a list of select methods, as well as the special symbol
current, which means to use the current select method. If it
is a list, Gnus will try all the methods in the list until it finds a
match.
Here's an example setting that will first try the current method, and then ask Google if that fails:
(setq gnus-refer-article-method
'(current
(nnweb "google" (nnweb-type google))))
Most of the mail back ends support fetching by Message-ID, but
do not do a particularly excellent job at it. That is, nnmbox,
nnbabyl, nnmaildir, nnml, are able to locate
articles from any groups, while nnfolder, and nnimap are
only able to locate articles that have been posted to the current
group. (Anything else would be too time consuming.) nnmh does
not support this at all.
Different people like to read news using different methods. This being Gnus, we offer a small selection of minor modes for the summary buffers.
Some newsreaders (like nn and, uhm, Netnews on VM/CMS) use
a two-phased reading interface. The user first marks in a summary
buffer the articles she wants to read. Then she starts reading the
articles with just an article buffer displayed.
Gnus provides a summary buffer minor mode that allows
this—gnus-pick-mode. This basically means that a few process
mark commands become one-keystroke commands to allow easy marking, and
it provides one additional command for switching to the summary buffer.
Here are the available keystrokes when using pick mode:
gnus-pick-article-or-thread). If the variable
gnus-thread-hide-subtree is true, then this key selects the
entire thread when used at the first article of the thread. Otherwise,
it selects just the article. If given a numerical prefix, go to that
thread or article and pick it. (The line number is normally displayed
at the beginning of the summary pick lines.)
gnus-pick-next-page). If
at the end of the buffer, start reading the picked articles.
gnus-pick-unmark-article-or-thread). If the variable
gnus-thread-hide-subtree is true, then this key unpicks the
thread if used at the first article of the thread. Otherwise it unpicks
just the article. You can give this key a numerical prefix to unpick
the thread or article at that line.
gnus-pick-start-reading). If
given a prefix, mark all unpicked articles as read first. If
gnus-pick-display-summary is non-nil, the summary buffer
will still be visible when you are reading.
All the normal summary mode commands are still available in the
pick-mode, with the exception of u. However ! is available
which is mapped to the same function
gnus-summary-tick-article-forward.
If this sounds like a good idea to you, you could say:
(add-hook 'gnus-summary-mode-hook 'gnus-pick-mode)
gnus-pick-mode-hook is run in pick minor mode buffers.
If gnus-mark-unpicked-articles-as-read is non-nil, mark
all unpicked articles as read. The default is nil.
The summary line format in pick mode is slightly different from the
standard format. At the beginning of each line the line number is
displayed. The pick mode line format is controlled by the
gnus-summary-pick-line-format variable (see Formatting Variables). It accepts the same format specs that
gnus-summary-line-format does (see Summary Buffer Lines).
If you spend much time in binary groups, you may grow tired of hitting X u, n, RET all the time. M-x gnus-binary-mode is a minor mode for summary buffers that makes all ordinary Gnus article selection functions uudecode series of articles and display the result instead of just displaying the articles the normal way.
The only way, in fact, to see the actual articles is the g
command, when you have turned on this mode
(gnus-binary-show-article).
gnus-binary-mode-hook is called in binary minor mode buffers.
If you don't like the normal Gnus summary display, you might try setting
gnus-use-trees to t. This will create (by default) an
additional tree buffer. You can execute all summary mode commands
in the tree buffer.
There are a few variables to customize the tree display, of course:
gnus-tree-mode-hookgnus-tree-mode-line-formatgnus-selected-tree-facemodeline.
gnus-tree-line-formatValid specs are:
From header.
See Formatting Variables.
Variables related to the display are:
gnus-tree-brackets ((real-open . real-close)
(sparse-open . sparse-close)
(dummy-open . dummy-close))
and the default is ((?[ . ?]) (?( . ?)) (?{ . ?}) (?< . ?>)).
gnus-tree-parent-child-edges(?- ?\\ ?|).
gnus-tree-minimize-windownil, Gnus will try to keep the tree
buffer as small as possible to allow more room for the other Gnus
windows. If this variable is a number, the tree buffer will never be
higher than that number. The default is t. Note that if you
have several windows displayed side-by-side in a frame and the tree
buffer is one of these, minimizing the tree window will also resize all
other windows displayed next to it.
You may also wish to add the following hook to keep the window minimized at all times:
(add-hook 'gnus-configure-windows-hook
'gnus-tree-perhaps-minimize)
gnus-generate-tree-functiongnus-generate-horizontal-tree and
gnus-generate-vertical-tree (which is the default).
Here's an example from a horizontal tree buffer:
{***}-(***)-[odd]-[Gun]
| \[Jan]
| \[odd]-[Eri]
| \(***)-[Eri]
| \[odd]-[Paa]
\[Bjo]
\[Gun]
\[Gun]-[Jor]
Here's the same thread displayed in a vertical tree buffer:
{***}
|--------------------------\-----\-----\
(***) [Bjo] [Gun] [Gun]
|--\-----\-----\ |
[odd] [Jan] [odd] (***) [Jor]
| | |--\
[Gun] [Eri] [Eri] [odd]
|
[Paa]
If you're using horizontal trees, it might be nice to display the trees side-by-side with the summary buffer. You could add something like the following to your ~/.gnus.el file:
(setq gnus-use-trees t
gnus-generate-tree-function 'gnus-generate-horizontal-tree
gnus-tree-minimize-window nil)
(gnus-add-configuration
'(article
(vertical 1.0
(horizontal 0.25
(summary 0.75 point)
(tree 1.0))
(article 1.0))))
See Window Layout.
Some commands only make sense in mail groups. If these commands are invalid in the current group, they will raise a hell and let you know.
All these commands (except the expiry and edit commands) use the process/prefix convention (see Process/Prefix).
gnus-summary-expire-articles). That is, delete all
expirable articles in the group that have been around for a while.
(see Expiring Mail).
gnus-summary-expire-articles-now). This means that all
articles eligible for expiry in the current group will
disappear forever into that big /dev/null in the sky.
gnus-summary-delete-article).
gnus-summary-move-article). Marks will be preserved if
gnus-preserve-marks is non-nil (which is the default).
gnus-summary-copy-article). Marks will be preserved if
gnus-preserve-marks is non-nil (which is the default).
gnus-summary-crosspost-article). This will create a new copy of
the article in the other group, and the Xref headers of the article will
be properly updated.
gnus-summary-import-article). You will be prompted for a file
name, a From header and a Subject header.
gnus-summary-create-article). You will be prompted for a
From header and a Subject header.
gnus-summary-respool-article).
gnus-summary-respool-default-method will be used as the default
select method when respooling. This variable is nil by default,
which means that the current group select method will be used instead.
Marks will be preserved if gnus-preserve-marks is non-nil
(which is the default).
gnus-summary-edit-article). To finish
editing and make the changes permanent, type C-c C-c
(gnus-summary-edit-article-done). If you give a prefix to the
C-c C-c command, Gnus won't re-highlight the article.
gnus-summary-respool-query).
gnus-summary-respool-trace).
Newsgroups header in them, but not always. This command
(gnus-summary-article-posted-p) will try to fetch the current
article from your news server (or rather, from
gnus-refer-article-method or gnus-select-method) and will
report back whether it found the article or not. Even if it says that
it didn't find the article, it may have been posted anyway—mail
propagation is much faster than news propagation, and the news copy may
just not have arrived yet.
gnus-article-encrypt-body).
The body is encrypted with the encryption protocol specified by the
variable gnus-article-encrypt-protocol.
If you move (or copy) articles regularly, you might wish to have Gnus
suggest where to put the articles. gnus-move-split-methods is a
variable that uses the same syntax as gnus-split-methods
(see Saving Articles). You may customize that variable to create
suggestions you find reasonable. (Note that
gnus-move-split-methods uses group names where
gnus-split-methods uses file names.)
(setq gnus-move-split-methods
'(("^From:.*Lars Magne" "nnml:junk")
("^Subject:.*gnus" "nnfolder:important")
(".*" "nnml:misc")))
gnus-summary-display-while-buildingnil, show and update the summary buffer as it's being
built. If t, update the buffer after every line is inserted.
If the value is an integer, n, update the display every n
lines. The default is nil.
gnus-summary-display-arrownil, display an arrow in the fringe to indicate the
current article.
gnus-summary-mode-hookgnus-summary-generate-hookgnus-summary-prepare-hookgnus-summary-prepared-hookgnus-summary-ignore-duplicatesMessage-ID,
it has to do something drastic. No articles are allowed to have the
same Message-ID, but this may happen when reading mail from some
sources. Gnus allows you to customize what happens with this variable.
If it is nil (which is the default), Gnus will rename the
Message-ID (for display purposes only) and display the article as
any other article. If this variable is t, it won't display the
article—it'll be as if it never existed.
gnus-alter-articles-to-read-functionFor instance, the following function adds the list of cached articles to the list in one particular group:
(defun my-add-cached-articles (group articles)
(if (string= group "some.group")
(append gnus-newsgroup-cached articles)
articles))
gnus-newsgroup-variablesnil), that should be made global while the summary
buffer is active.
Note: The default expressions will be evaluated (using function
eval) before assignment to the local variable rather than just
assigned to it. If the default expression is the symbol global,
that symbol will not be evaluated but the global value of the local
variable will be used instead.
These variables can be used to set variables in the group parameters while still allowing them to affect operations done in other buffers. For example:
(setq gnus-newsgroup-variables
'(message-use-followup-to
(gnus-visible-headers .
"^From:\\|^Newsgroups:\\|^Subject:\\|^Date:\\|^To:")))
Also see Group Parameters.
gnus-summary-fetch-faq). Gnus will try
to get the FAQ from gnus-group-faq-directory, which
is usually a directory on a remote machine. This variable can also be
a list of directories. In that case, giving a prefix to this command
will allow you to choose between the various sites. ange-ftp
or efs will probably be used for fetching the file.
gnus-summary-describe-group). If given a prefix, force
rereading the description from the server.
gnus-summary-describe-briefly).
gnus-info-find-node).
gnus-summary-search-article-forward).
gnus-summary-search-article-backward).
gnus-summary-execute-command). If the header is an empty
string, the match is done on the entire article. If given a prefix,
search backward instead.
For instance, & RET some.*string RET # will put the process mark on
all articles that have heads or bodies that match `some.*string'.
gnus-summary-universal-argument).
gnus-summary-prepare).
gnus-summary-insert-cached-articles).
gnus-summary-insert-dormant-articles).
gnus-summary-enter-digest-group). Gnus will try to
guess what article type is currently displayed unless you give a prefix
to this command, which forces a “digest” interpretation. Basically,
whenever you see a message that is a collection of other messages of
some format, you C-d and read these messages in a more convenient
fashion.
gnus-summary-read-document). It does this by opening several
nndoc groups for each document, and then opening an
nnvirtual group on top of these nndoc groups. This
command understands the process/prefix convention
(see Process/Prefix).
gnus-summary-toggle-truncation). This will probably confuse the
line centering function in the summary buffer, so it's not a good idea
to have truncation switched off while reading articles.
gnus-summary-expand-window).
If given a prefix, force an article window configuration.
gnus-summary-edit-parameters).
gnus-summary-customize-parameters).
Exiting from the summary buffer will normally update all info on the group and return you to the group buffer.
gnus-summary-exit). gnus-summary-prepare-exit-hook is
called before doing much of the exiting, which calls
gnus-summary-expire-articles by default.
gnus-summary-exit-hook is called after finishing the exit
process. gnus-group-no-more-groups-hook is run when returning to
group mode having no more (unread) groups.
gnus-summary-exit-no-update).
gnus-summary-catchup-and-exit).
gnus-summary-catchup-all-and-exit).
gnus-summary-catchup-and-goto-next-group).
gnus-summary-reselect-current-group). If given a prefix, select
all articles, both read and unread.
gnus-summary-rescan-group). If given a prefix, select all
articles, both read and unread.
gnus-summary-next-group).
gnus-summary-prev-group).
gnus-summary-save-newsrc). If
given a prefix, also save the .newsrc file(s). Using this
command will make exit without updating (the Q command) worthless.
gnus-exit-group-hook is called when you exit the current group
with an “updating” exit. For instance Q
(gnus-summary-exit-no-update) does not call this hook.
If you're in the habit of exiting groups, and then changing your mind
about it, you might set gnus-kill-summary-on-exit to nil.
If you do that, Gnus won't kill the summary buffer when you exit it.
(Quelle surprise!) Instead it will change the name of the buffer to
something like `*Dead Summary ... *' and install a minor mode
called gnus-dead-summary-mode. Now, if you switch back to this
buffer, you'll find that all keys are mapped to a function called
gnus-summary-wake-up-the-dead. So tapping any keys in a dead
summary buffer will result in a live, normal summary buffer.
There will never be more than one dead summary buffer at any one time.
The data on the current group will be updated (which articles you have
read, which articles you have replied to, etc.) when you exit the
summary buffer. If the gnus-use-cross-reference variable is
t (which is the default), articles that are cross-referenced to
this group and are marked as read, will also be marked as read in the
other subscribed groups they were cross-posted to. If this variable is
neither nil nor t, the article will be marked as read in
both subscribed and unsubscribed groups (see Crosspost Handling).
Marking cross-posted articles as read ensures that you'll never have to read the same article more than once. Unless, of course, somebody has posted it to several groups separately. Posting the same article to several groups (not cross-posting) is called spamming, and you are by law required to send nasty-grams to anyone who perpetrates such a heinous crime. You may want to try NoCeM handling to filter out spam (see NoCeM).
Remember: Cross-posting is kinda ok, but posting the same article
separately to several groups is not. Massive cross-posting (aka.
velveeta) is to be avoided at all costs, and you can even use the
gnus-summary-mail-crosspost-complaint command to complain about
excessive crossposting (see Summary Mail Commands).
One thing that may cause Gnus to not do the cross-posting thing
correctly is if you use an NNTP server that supports xover
(which is very nice, because it speeds things up considerably) which
does not include the Xref header in its NOV lines. This is
Evil, but all too common, alas, alack. Gnus tries to Do The Right Thing
even with xover by registering the Xref lines of all
articles you actually read, but if you kill the articles, or just mark
them as read without reading them, Gnus will not get a chance to snoop
the Xref lines out of these articles, and will be unable to use
the cross reference mechanism.
To check whether your NNTP server includes the Xref header
in its overview files, try `telnet your.nntp.server nntp',
`MODE READER' on inn servers, and then say `LIST
overview.fmt'. This may not work, but if it does, and the last line you
get does not read `Xref:full', then you should shout and whine at
your news admin until she includes the Xref header in the
overview files.
If you want Gnus to get the Xrefs right all the time, you have to
set gnus-nov-is-evil to t, which slows things down
considerably.
C'est la vie.
For an alternative approach, see Duplicate Suppression.
By default, Gnus tries to make sure that you don't have to read the same article more than once by utilizing the crossposting mechanism (see Crosspost Handling). However, that simple and efficient approach may not work satisfactory for some users for various reasons.
Xref header. This
is evil and not very common.
Xref header in the
.overview data bases. This is evil and all too common, alas.
I'm sure there are other situations where Xref handling fails as
well, but these four are the most common situations.
If, and only if, Xref handling fails for you, then you may
consider switching on duplicate suppression. If you do so, Gnus
will remember the Message-IDs of all articles you have read or
otherwise marked as read, and then, as if by magic, mark them as read
all subsequent times you see them—in all groups. Using this
mechanism is quite likely to be somewhat inefficient, but not overly
so. It's certainly preferable to reading the same articles more than
once.
Duplicate suppression is not a very subtle instrument. It's more like a sledge hammer than anything else. It works in a very simple fashion—if you have marked an article as read, it adds this Message-ID to a cache. The next time it sees this Message-ID, it will mark the article as read with the `M' mark. It doesn't care what group it saw the article in.
gnus-suppress-duplicatesnil, suppress duplicates.
gnus-save-duplicate-listnil, save the list of duplicates to a file. This will
make startup and shutdown take longer, so the default is nil.
However, this means that only duplicate articles read in a single Gnus
session are suppressed.
gnus-duplicate-list-lengthMessage-IDs to keep in the duplicate
suppression list. The default is 10000.
gnus-duplicate-fileIf you have a tendency to stop and start Gnus often, setting
gnus-save-duplicate-list to t is probably a good idea. If
you leave Gnus running for weeks on end, you may have it nil. On
the other hand, saving the list makes startup and shutdown much slower,
so that means that if you stop and start Gnus often, you should set
gnus-save-duplicate-list to nil. Uhm. I'll leave this up
to you to figure out, I think.
Gnus is able to verify signed messages or decrypt encrypted messages. The formats that are supported are PGP, PGP/MIME and S/MIME, however you need some external programs to get things to work:
The variables that control security functionality on reading messages include:
mm-verify-optionnever, not verify;
always, always verify; known, only verify known
protocols. Otherwise, ask user.
mm-decrypt-optionnever, no decryption;
always, always decrypt; known, only decrypt known
protocols. Otherwise, ask user.
mml1991-usepgg, but
mailcrypt and gpg are also supported although
deprecated.
mml2015-usepgg, but
mailcrypt and gpg are also supported although
deprecated.
By default the buttons that display security information are not
shown, because they clutter reading the actual e-mail. You can type
K b manually to display the information. Use the
gnus-buttonized-mime-types and
gnus-unbuttonized-mime-types variables to control this
permanently. MIME Commands for further details, and hints on
how to customize these variables to always display security
information.
Snarfing OpenPGP keys (i.e., importing keys from articles into your key ring) is not supported explicitly through a menu item or command, rather Gnus do detect and label keys as `application/pgp-keys', allowing you to specify whatever action you think is appropriate through the usual MIME infrastructure. You can use a ~/.mailcap entry (see mailcap) such as the following to import keys using GNU Privacy Guard when you click on the MIME button (see Using MIME).
application/pgp-keys; gpg --import --interactive --verbose; needsterminal
This happens to also be the default action defined in
mailcap-mime-data.
More information on how to set things for sending outgoing signed and encrypted messages up can be found in the message manual (see Security).
Gnus understands some mailing list fields of RFC 2369. To enable it,
add a to-list group parameter (see Group Parameters),
possibly using A M (gnus-mailing-list-insinuate) in the
summary buffer.
That enables the following commands to the summary buffer:
The articles are displayed in the article buffer, of which there is only one. All the summary buffers share the same article buffer unless you tell Gnus otherwise.
The top section of each article is the head. (The rest is the body, but you may have guessed that already.)
There is a lot of useful information in the head: the name of the person
who wrote the article, the date it was written and the subject of the
article. That's well and nice, but there's also lots of information
most people do not want to see—what systems the article has passed
through before reaching you, the Message-ID, the
References, etc. ad nauseam—and you'll probably want to get rid
of some of those lines. If you want to keep all those lines in the
article buffer, you can set gnus-show-all-headers to t.
Gnus provides you with two variables for sifting headers:
gnus-visible-headersnil, it should be a regular expression
that says what headers you wish to keep in the article buffer. All
headers that do not match this variable will be hidden.
For instance, if you only want to see the name of the person who wrote the article and the subject, you'd say:
(setq gnus-visible-headers "^From:\\|^Subject:")
This variable can also be a list of regexps to match headers to
remain visible.
gnus-ignored-headersgnus-visible-headers. If this
variable is set (and gnus-visible-headers is nil), it
should be a regular expression that matches all lines that you want to
hide. All lines that do not match this variable will remain visible.
For instance, if you just want to get rid of the References line
and the Xref line, you might say:
(setq gnus-ignored-headers "^References:\\|^Xref:")
This variable can also be a list of regexps to match headers to be removed.
Note that if gnus-visible-headers is non-nil, this
variable will have no effect.
Gnus can also sort the headers for you. (It does this by default.) You
can control the sorting by setting the gnus-sorted-header-list
variable. It is a list of regular expressions that says in what order
the headers are to be displayed.
For instance, if you want the name of the author of the article first, and then the subject, you might say something like:
(setq gnus-sorted-header-list '("^From:" "^Subject:"))
Any headers that are to remain visible, but are not listed in this variable, will be displayed in random order after all the headers listed in this variable.
You can hide further boring headers by setting
gnus-treat-hide-boring-headers to head. What this function
does depends on the gnus-boring-article-headers variable. It's a
list, but this list doesn't actually contain header names. Instead it
lists various boring conditions that Gnus can check and remove
from sight.
These conditions are:
emptyfollowup-toFollowup-To header if it is identical to the
Newsgroups header.
reply-toReply-To header if it lists the same addresses as
the From header, or if the broken-reply-to group
parameter is set.
newsgroupsNewsgroups header if it only contains the current group
name.
to-addressTo header if it only contains the address identical to
the current group's to-address parameter.
to-listTo header if it only contains the address identical to
the current group's to-list parameter.
cc-listCc header if it only contains the address identical to
the current group's to-list parameter.
dateDate header if the article is less than three days
old.
long-toTo and/or Cc header if it is very long.
many-toTo and/or Cc headers if there are more than one.
To include these three elements, you could say something like:
(setq gnus-boring-article-headers
'(empty followup-to reply-to))
This is also the default value for this variable.
Mime is a standard for waving your hands through the air, aimlessly, while people stand around yawning.
MIME, however, is a standard for encoding your articles, aimlessly, while all newsreaders die of fear.
MIME may specify what character set the article uses, the encoding of the characters, and it also makes it possible to embed pictures and other naughty stuff in innocent-looking articles.
Gnus pushes MIME articles through gnus-display-mime-function
to display the MIME parts. This is gnus-display-mime by
default, which creates a bundle of clickable buttons that can be used to
display, save and manipulate the MIME objects.
The following commands are available when you have placed point over a MIME button:
gnus-article-press-button). If built-in viewers can not display
the object, Gnus resorts to external viewers in the mailcap
files. If a viewer has the `copiousoutput' specification, the
object is displayed inline.
gnus-mime-view-part).
gnus-mime-view-part-as-type).
gnus-mime-view-part-as-charset).
gnus-mime-save-part).
gnus-mime-save-part-and-strip).
gnus-mime-delete-part).
gnus-mime-copy-part). Compressed files like .gz and
.bz2 are automatically decompressed if
auto-compression-mode is enabled (see Accessing Compressed Files).
gnus-mime-print-part). This
command respects the `print=' specifications in the
.mailcap file.
gnus-mime-inline-part) as text/plain. If given a prefix, insert
the raw contents without decoding. If given a numerical prefix, you can
do semi-manual charset stuff (see
gnus-summary-show-article-charset-alist in Paging the Article).
gnus-mime-view-part-internally).
gnus-mime-view-part-externally).
gnus-mime-pipe-part).
gnus-mime-action-on-part).
Gnus will display some MIME objects automatically. The way Gnus determines which parts to do this with is described in the Emacs MIME manual.
It might be best to just use the toggling functions from the article buffer to avoid getting nasty surprises. (For instance, you enter the group `alt.sing-a-long' and, before you know it, MIME has decoded the sound file in the article and some horrible sing-a-long song comes screaming out your speakers, and you can't find the volume button, because there isn't one, and people are starting to look at you, and you try to stop the program, but you can't, and you can't find the program to control the volume, and everybody else in the room suddenly decides to look at you disdainfully, and you'll feel rather stupid.)
Any similarity to real events and people is purely coincidental. Ahem.
Also see MIME Commands.
A slew of functions for customizing how the articles are to look like exist. You can call these functions interactively (see Article Washing), or you can have them called automatically when you select the articles.
To have them called automatically, you should set the corresponding
“treatment” variable. For instance, to have headers hidden, you'd set
gnus-treat-hide-headers. Below is a list of variables that can
be set, but first we discuss the values these variables can have.
Note: Some values, while valid, make little sense. Check the list below for sensible values.
nil: Don't do this treatment.
t: Do this treatment on all body parts.
head: Do the treatment on the headers.
last: Do this treatment on the last part.
The list is evaluated recursively. The first element of the list is a
predicate. The following predicates are recognized: or,
and, not and typep. Here's an example:
(or last
(typep "text/x-vcard"))
You may have noticed that the word part is used here. This refers to the fact that some messages are MIME multipart articles that may be divided into several parts. Articles that are not multiparts are considered to contain just a single part.
Are the treatments applied to all sorts of multipart parts? Yes, if you
want to, but by default, only `text/plain' parts are given the
treatment. This is controlled by the gnus-article-treat-types
variable, which is a list of regular expressions that are matched to the
type of the part. This variable is ignored if the value of the
controlling variable is a predicate list, as described above.
The following treatment options are available. The easiest way to
customize this is to examine the gnus-article-treat customization
group. Values in parenthesis are suggested sensible values. Others are
possible but those listed are probably sufficient for most people.
gnus-treat-buttonize (t, integer)gnus-treat-buttonize-head (head)gnus-treat-capitalize-sentences (t, integer)gnus-treat-overstrike (t, integer)gnus-treat-strip-cr (t, integer)gnus-treat-strip-headers-in-body (t, integer)gnus-treat-strip-leading-blank-lines (t, integer)gnus-treat-strip-multiple-blank-lines (t, integer)gnus-treat-strip-pem (t, last, integer)gnus-treat-strip-trailing-blank-lines (t, last, integer)gnus-treat-unsplit-urls (t, integer)gnus-treat-wash-html (t, integer)gnus-treat-date-english (head)gnus-treat-date-iso8601 (head)gnus-treat-date-lapsed (head)gnus-treat-date-local (head)gnus-treat-date-original (head)gnus-treat-date-user-defined (head)gnus-treat-date-ut (head)gnus-treat-from-picon (head)gnus-treat-mail-picon (head)gnus-treat-newsgroups-picon (head)gnus-treat-display-smileys (t, integer)
gnus-treat-body-boundary (head)gnus-body-boundary-delimiter.
See Smileys.
gnus-treat-display-x-face (head)gnus-treat-display-face (head)gnus-treat-emphasize (t, head, integer)gnus-treat-fill-article (t, integer)gnus-treat-fill-long-lines (t, integer)gnus-treat-hide-boring-headers (head)gnus-treat-hide-citation (t, integer)gnus-treat-hide-citation-maybe (t, integer)gnus-treat-hide-headers (head)gnus-treat-hide-signature (t, last)gnus-treat-strip-banner (t, last)gnus-treat-strip-list-identifiers (head)gnus-treat-highlight-citation (t, integer)gnus-treat-highlight-headers (head)gnus-treat-highlight-signature (t, last, integer)gnus-treat-play-soundsgnus-treat-translategnus-treat-x-pgp-sig (head)gnus-treat-unfold-headers (head)gnus-treat-fold-headers (head)gnus-treat-fold-newsgroups (head)gnus-treat-leading-whitespace (head)You can, of course, write your own functions to be called from
gnus-part-display-hook. The functions are called narrowed to the
part, and you can do anything you like, pretty much. There is no
information that you have to keep in the buffer—you can change
everything.
Most of the keystrokes in the summary buffer can also be used in the article buffer. They should behave as if you typed them in the summary buffer, which means that you don't actually have to have a summary buffer displayed while reading. You can do it all from the article buffer.
The key v is reserved for users. You can bind it key to some function or better use it as a prefix key.
A few additional keystrokes are available:
gnus-article-next-page).
This is exactly the same as h SPACE h.
gnus-article-prev-page).
This is exactly the same as h DEL h.
Message-ID and you press
C-c ^, Gnus will try to get that article from the server
(gnus-article-refer-article).
gnus-article-mail). If
given a prefix, include the mail.
gnus-article-show-summary).
gnus-article-describe-briefly).
gnus-article-next-button). This
only makes sense if you have buttonizing turned on.
gnus-article-prev-button).
gnus-article-reply-with-original). If given a prefix, make a
wide reply. If the region is active, only yank the text in the
region.
gnus-article-followup-with-original). If given a prefix, make
a wide reply. If the region is active, only yank the text in the
region.
gnus-single-article-buffernil, use the same article buffer for all the groups.
(This is the default.) If nil, each group will have its own
article buffer.
gnus-article-decode-hook(article-decode-charset article-decode-encoded-words)
gnus-article-prepare-hookgnus-article-mode-hookgnus-article-mode-syntax-tabletext-mode-syntax-table.
gnus-article-over-scrollnil, allow scrolling the article buffer even when there
no more new text to scroll in. The default is nil.
gnus-article-mode-line-formatgnus-summary-mode-line-format (see Summary Buffer Mode Line). It accepts the same format specifications as that variable,
with two extensions:
gnus-break-pagesnil, the articles will be divided into pages whenever a
page delimiter appears in the article. If this variable is nil,
paging will not be done.
gnus-page-delimitergnus-use-idnaAll commands for posting and mailing will put you in a message buffer where you can edit the article all you like, before you send the article by pressing C-c C-c. See Overview. Where the message will be posted/mailed to depends on your setup (see Posting Server).
Also see Canceling and Superseding for information on how to remove articles you shouldn't have posted.
Variables for customizing outgoing mail:
gnus-uu-digest-headersnil include all headers.
gnus-add-to-listnil, add a to-list group parameter to mail groups
that have none when you do a a.
gnus-confirm-mail-reply-to-newsnil, Gnus will ask you for a confirmation when you are
about to reply to news articles by mail. If it is nil, nothing
interferes in what you want to do. This can also be a function
receiving the group name as the only parameter which should return
non-nil if a confirmation is needed, or a regular expression
matching group names, where confirmation should be asked for.
If you find yourself never wanting to reply to mail, but occasionally
press R anyway, this variable might be for you.
gnus-confirm-treat-mail-like-newsnil, Gnus also requests confirmation according to
gnus-confirm-mail-reply-to-news when replying to mail. This is
useful for treating mailing lists like newsgroups.
When you press those magical C-c C-c keys to ship off your latest (extremely intelligent, of course) article, where does it go?
Thank you for asking. I hate you.
It can be quite complicated.
When posting news, Message usually invokes message-send-news
(see News Variables).
Normally, Gnus will post using the same select method as you're
reading from (which might be convenient if you're reading lots of
groups from different private servers). However. If the server
you're reading from doesn't allow posting, just reading, you probably
want to use some other server to post your (extremely intelligent and
fabulously interesting) articles. You can then set the
gnus-post-method to some other method:
(setq gnus-post-method '(nnspool ""))
Now, if you've done this, and then this server rejects your article, or this server is down, what do you do then? To override this variable you can use a non-zero prefix to the C-c C-c command to force using the “current” server, to get back the default behavior, for posting.
If you give a zero prefix (i.e., C-u 0 C-c C-c) to that command, Gnus will prompt you for what method to use for posting.
You can also set gnus-post-method to a list of select methods.
If that's the case, Gnus will always prompt you for what method to use
for posting.
Finally, if you want to always post using the native select method,
you can set this variable to native.
When sending mail, Message invokes message-send-mail-function.
The default function, message-send-mail-with-sendmail, pipes
your article to the sendmail binary for further queuing and
sending. When your local system is not configured for sending mail
using sendmail, and you have access to a remote SMTP
server, you can set message-send-mail-function to
smtpmail-send-it and make sure to setup the smtpmail
package correctly. An example:
(setq message-send-mail-function 'smtpmail-send-it
smtpmail-default-smtp-server "YOUR SMTP HOST")
To the thing similar to this, there is
message-smtpmail-send-it. It is useful if your ISP
requires the POP-before-SMTP authentication.
See POP before SMTP.
Other possible choices for message-send-mail-function includes
message-send-mail-with-mh, message-send-mail-with-qmail,
and feedmail-send-it.
Does your ISP require the POP-before-SMTP authentication? It is whether you need to connect to the POP mail server within a certain time before sending mails. If so, there is a convenient way. To do that, put the following lines in your ~/.gnus.el file:
(setq message-send-mail-function 'message-smtpmail-send-it)
(add-hook 'message-send-mail-hook 'mail-source-touch-pop)
It means to let Gnus connect to the POP mail server in advance
whenever you send a mail. The mail-source-touch-pop function
does only a POP authentication according to the value of
mail-sources without fetching mails, just before sending a mail.
Note that you have to use message-smtpmail-send-it which runs
message-send-mail-hook rather than smtpmail-send-it and
set the value of mail-sources for a POP connection
correctly. See Mail Sources.
If you have two or more POP mail servers set in
mail-sources, you may want to specify one of them to
mail-source-primary-source as the POP mail server to be
used for the POP-before-SMTP authentication. If it
is your primary POP mail server (i.e., you are fetching mails
mainly from that server), you can set it permanently as follows:
(setq mail-source-primary-source
'(pop :server "pop3.mail.server"
:password "secret"))
Otherwise, bind it dynamically only when performing the POP-before-SMTP authentication as follows:
(add-hook 'message-send-mail-hook
(lambda ()
(let ((mail-source-primary-source
'(pop :server "pop3.mail.server"
:password "secret")))
(mail-source-touch-pop))))
Here's a list of variables relevant to both mailing and posting:
gnus-mailing-list-groupsto-address to the group parameters
(see Group Parameters). An easier thing to do is set the
gnus-mailing-list-groups to a regexp that matches the groups that
really are mailing lists. Then, at least, followups to the mailing
lists will work most of the time. Posting to these groups (a) is
still a pain, though.
gnus-user-agentgnus (show Gnus version) and emacs (show Emacs
version). In addition to the Emacs version, you can add codename
(show (S)XEmacs codename) or either config (show system
configuration) or type (show system type). If you set it to a
string, be sure to use a valid format, see RFC 2616.
You may want to do spell-checking on messages that you send out. Or, if
you don't want to spell-check by hand, you could add automatic
spell-checking via the ispell package:
(add-hook 'message-send-hook 'ispell-message)
If you want to change the ispell dictionary based on what group
you're in, you could say something like the following:
(add-hook 'gnus-select-group-hook
(lambda ()
(cond
((string-match
"^de\\." (gnus-group-real-name gnus-newsgroup-name))
(ispell-change-dictionary "deutsch"))
(t
(ispell-change-dictionary "english")))))
Modify to suit your needs.
Gnus provides a few different methods for storing the mail and news you
send. The default method is to use the archive virtual server to
store the messages. If you want to disable this completely, the
gnus-message-archive-group variable should be nil, which
is the default.
For archiving interesting messages in a group you read, see the
B c (gnus-summary-copy-article) command (see Mail Group Commands).
gnus-message-archive-method says what virtual server Gnus is to
use to store sent messages. The default is:
(nnfolder "archive"
(nnfolder-directory "~/Mail/archive")
(nnfolder-active-file "~/Mail/archive/active")
(nnfolder-get-new-mail nil)
(nnfolder-inhibit-expiry t))
You can, however, use any mail select method (nnml,
nnmbox, etc.). nnfolder is a quite likable select method
for doing this sort of thing, though. If you don't like the default
directory chosen, you could say something like:
(setq gnus-message-archive-method
'(nnfolder "archive"
(nnfolder-inhibit-expiry t)
(nnfolder-active-file "~/News/sent-mail/active")
(nnfolder-directory "~/News/sent-mail/")))
Gnus will insert Gcc headers in all outgoing messages that point
to one or more group(s) on that server. Which group to use is
determined by the gnus-message-archive-group variable.
This variable can be used to do the following:
Note that you can include a select method in the group name, then the
message will not be stored in the select method given by
gnus-message-archive-method, but in the select method specified
by the group name, instead. Suppose gnus-message-archive-method
has the default value shown above. Then setting
gnus-message-archive-group to "foo" means that outgoing
messages are stored in `nnfolder+archive:foo', but if you use the
value "nnml:foo", then outgoing messages will be stored in
`nnml:foo'.
nilLet's illustrate:
Just saving to a single group called `MisK':
(setq gnus-message-archive-group "MisK")
Saving to two groups, `MisK' and `safe':
(setq gnus-message-archive-group '("MisK" "safe"))
Save to different groups based on what group you are in:
(setq gnus-message-archive-group
'(("^alt" "sent-to-alt")
("mail" "sent-to-mail")
(".*" "sent-to-misc")))
More complex stuff:
(setq gnus-message-archive-group
'((if (message-news-p)
"misc-news"
"misc-mail")))
How about storing all news messages in one file, but storing all mail messages in one file per month:
(setq gnus-message-archive-group
'((if (message-news-p)
"misc-news"
(concat "mail." (format-time-string "%Y-%m")))))
Now, when you send a message off, it will be stored in the appropriate
group. (If you want to disable storing for just one particular message,
you can just remove the Gcc header that has been inserted.) The
archive group will appear in the group buffer the next time you start
Gnus, or the next time you press F in the group buffer. You can
enter it and read the articles in it just like you'd read any other
group. If the group gets really big and annoying, you can simply rename
if (using G r in the group buffer) to something
nice—`misc-mail-september-1995', or whatever. New messages will
continue to be stored in the old (now empty) group.
That's the default method of archiving sent messages. Gnus offers a
different way for the people who don't like the default method. In that
case you should set gnus-message-archive-group to nil;
this will disable archiving.
gnus-outgoing-message-groupIf you want to have greater control over what group to put each message in, you can set this variable to a function that checks the current newsgroup name and then returns a suitable group name (or list of names).
This variable can be used instead of gnus-message-archive-group,
but the latter is the preferred method.
gnus-gcc-mark-as-readnil, automatically mark Gcc articles as read.
gnus-gcc-externalize-attachmentsnil, attach files as normal parts in Gcc copies; if a regexp
and matches the Gcc group name, attach files as external parts; if it is
all, attach local files as external parts; if it is other
non-nil, the behavior is the same as all, but it may be
changed in the future.
All them variables, they make my head swim.
So what if you want a different Organization and signature based
on what groups you post to? And you post both from your home machine
and your work machine, and you want different From lines, and so
on?
One way to do stuff like that is to write clever hooks that change the
variables you need to have changed. That's a bit boring, so somebody
came up with the bright idea of letting the user specify these things in
a handy alist. Here's an example of a gnus-posting-styles
variable:
((".*"
(signature "Peace and happiness")
(organization "What me?"))
("^comp"
(signature "Death to everybody"))
("comp.emacs.i-love-it"
(organization "Emacs is it")))
As you might surmise from this example, this alist consists of several
styles. Each style will be applicable if the first element
“matches”, in some form or other. The entire alist will be iterated
over, from the beginning towards the end, and each match will be
applied, which means that attributes in later styles that match override
the same attributes in earlier matching styles. So
`comp.programming.literate' will have the `Death to everybody'
signature and the `What me?' Organization header.
The first element in each style is called the match. If it's a
string, then Gnus will try to regexp match it against the group name.
If it is the form (header match regexp), then Gnus
will look in the original article for a header whose name is
match and compare that regexp. match and
regexp are strings. (The original article is the one you are
replying or following up to. If you are not composing a reply or a
followup, then there is nothing to match against.) If the
match is a function symbol, that function will be called with
no arguments. If it's a variable symbol, then the variable will be
referenced. If it's a list, then that list will be evaled. In
any case, if this returns a non-nil value, then the style is
said to match.
Each style may contain an arbitrary amount of attributes. Each
attribute consists of a (name value) pair. In
addition, you can also use the (name :file value)
form or the (name :value value) form. Where
:file signifies value represents a file name and its
contents should be used as the attribute value, :value signifies
value does not represent a file name explicitly. The attribute
name can be one of:
signature
signature-file
x-face-file
address, overriding user-mail-address
name, overriding (user-full-name)
body
The attribute name can also be a string or a symbol. In that case,
this will be used as a header name, and the value will be inserted in
the headers of the article; if the value is nil, the header
name will be removed. If the attribute name is eval, the form
is evaluated, and the result is thrown away.
The attribute value can be a string (used verbatim), a function with
zero arguments (the return value will be used), a variable (its value
will be used) or a list (it will be evaled and the return value
will be used). The functions and sexps are called/evaled in the
message buffer that is being set up. The headers of the current article
are available through the message-reply-headers variable, which
is a vector of the following headers: number subject from date id
references chars lines xref extra.
If you wish to check whether the message you are about to compose is
meant to be a news article or a mail message, you can check the values
of the message-news-p and message-mail-p functions.
(setq gnus-posting-styles
'((".*"
(signature-file "~/.signature")
(name "User Name")
(x-face-file "~/.xface")
(x-url (getenv "WWW_HOME"))
(organization "People's Front Against MWM"))
("^rec.humor"
(signature my-funny-signature-randomizer))
((equal (system-name) "gnarly") ;; A form
(signature my-quote-randomizer))
(message-news-p ;; A function symbol
(signature my-news-signature))
(window-system ;; A value symbol
("X-Window-System" (format "%s" window-system)))
;; If I'm replying to Larsi, set the Organization header.
((header "from" "larsi.*org")
(Organization "Somewhere, Inc."))
((posting-from-work-p) ;; A user defined function
(signature-file "~/.work-signature")
(address "user@bar.foo")
(body "You are fired.\n\nSincerely, your boss.")
(organization "Important Work, Inc"))
("nnml:.*"
(From (save-excursion
(set-buffer gnus-article-buffer)
(message-fetch-field "to"))))
("^nn.+:"
(signature-file "~/.mail-signature"))))
The `nnml:.*' rule means that you use the To address as the
From address in all your outgoing replies, which might be handy
if you fill many roles.
You may also use message-alternative-emails instead.
See Message Headers.
If you are writing a message (mail or news) and suddenly remember that you have a steak in the oven (or some pesto in the food processor, you craaazy vegetarians), you'll probably wish there was a method to save the message you are writing so that you can continue editing it some other day, and send it when you feel its finished.
Well, don't worry about it. Whenever you start composing a message of some sort using the Gnus mail and post commands, the buffer you get will automatically associate to an article in a special draft group. If you save the buffer the normal way (C-x C-s, for instance), the article will be saved there. (Auto-save files also go to the draft group.)
The draft group is a special group (which is implemented as an
nndraft group, if you absolutely have to know) called
`nndraft:drafts'. The variable nndraft-directory says where
nndraft is to store its files. What makes this group special is
that you can't tick any articles in it or mark any articles as
read—all articles in the group are permanently unread.
If the group doesn't exist, it will be created and you'll be subscribed to it. The only way to make it disappear from the Group buffer is to unsubscribe it. The special properties of the draft group comes from a group property (see Group Parameters), and if lost the group behaves like any other group. This means the commands below will not be available. To restore the special properties of the group, the simplest way is to kill the group, using C-k, and restart Gnus. The group is automatically created again with the correct parameters. The content of the group is not lost.
When you want to continue editing the article, you simply enter the
draft group and push D e (gnus-draft-edit-message) to do
that. You will be placed in a buffer where you left off.
Rejected articles will also be put in this draft group (see Rejected Articles).
If you have lots of rejected messages you want to post (or mail) without
doing further editing, you can use the D s command
(gnus-draft-send-message). This command understands the
process/prefix convention (see Process/Prefix). The D S
command (gnus-draft-send-all-messages) will ship off all messages
in the buffer.
If you have some messages that you wish not to send, you can use the
D t (gnus-draft-toggle-sending) command to mark the message
as unsendable. This is a toggling command.
Sometimes a news server will reject an article. Perhaps the server doesn't like your face. Perhaps it just feels miserable. Perhaps there be demons. Perhaps you have included too much cited text. Perhaps the disk is full. Perhaps the server is down.
These situations are, of course, totally beyond the control of Gnus. (Gnus, of course, loves the way you look, always feels great, has angels fluttering around inside of it, doesn't care about how much cited text you include, never runs full and never goes down.) So Gnus saves these articles until some later time when the server feels better.
The rejected articles will automatically be put in a special draft group (see Drafts). When the server comes back up again, you'd then typically enter that group and send all the articles off.
Gnus can digitally sign and encrypt your messages, using vanilla
PGP format or PGP/MIME or S/MIME. For
decoding such messages, see the mm-verify-option and
mm-decrypt-option options (see Security).
Often, you would like to sign replies to people who send you signed
messages. Even more often, you might want to encrypt messages which
are in reply to encrypted messages. Gnus offers
gnus-message-replysign to enable the former, and
gnus-message-replyencrypt for the latter. In addition, setting
gnus-message-replysignencrypted (on by default) will sign
automatically encrypted messages.
Instructing MML to perform security operations on a MIME part is done using the C-c C-m s key map for signing and the C-c C-m c key map for encryption, as follows.
See Security, for more information.
A foreign group is a group not read by the usual (or default) means. It could be, for instance, a group from a different NNTP server, it could be a virtual group, or it could be your own personal mail group.
A foreign group (or any group, really) is specified by a name and
a select method. To take the latter first, a select method is a
list where the first element says what back end to use (e.g. nntp,
nnspool, nnml) and the second element is the server
name. There may be additional elements in the select method, where the
value may have special meaning for the back end in question.
One could say that a select method defines a virtual server—so we do just that (see Server Buffer).
The name of the group is the name the back end will recognize the group as.
For instance, the group `soc.motss' on the NNTP server
`some.where.edu' will have the name `soc.motss' and select
method (nntp "some.where.edu"). Gnus will call this group
`nntp+some.where.edu:soc.motss', even though the nntp
back end just knows this group as `soc.motss'.
The different methods all have their peculiarities, of course.
Traditionally, a server is a machine or a piece of software that one connects to, and then requests information from. Gnus does not connect directly to any real servers, but does all transactions through one back end or other. But that's just putting one layer more between the actual media and Gnus, so we might just as well say that each back end represents a virtual server.
For instance, the nntp back end may be used to connect to several
different actual NNTP servers, or, perhaps, to many different ports
on the same actual NNTP server. You tell Gnus which back end to
use, and what parameters to set by specifying a select method.
These select method specifications can sometimes become quite complicated—say, for instance, that you want to read from the NNTP server `news.funet.fi' on port number 13, which hangs if queried for NOV headers and has a buggy select. Ahem. Anyway, if you had to specify that for each group that used this server, that would be too much work, so Gnus offers a way of naming select methods, which is what you do in the server buffer.
To enter the server buffer, use the ^
(gnus-group-enter-server-mode) command in the group buffer.
gnus-server-mode-hook is run when creating the server buffer.
You can change the look of the server buffer lines by changing the
gnus-server-line-format variable. This is a format-like
variable, with some simple extensions:
The mode line can also be customized by using the
gnus-server-mode-line-format variable (see Mode Line Formatting). The following specs are understood:
Also see Formatting Variables.
gnus-server-add-server).
gnus-server-edit-server).
gnus-server-read-server).
gnus-server-exit).
gnus-server-kill-server).
gnus-server-yank-server).
gnus-server-copy-server).
gnus-server-list-servers).
gnus-server-scan-server). This is mainly sensible with mail
servers.
gnus-server-regenerate-server). This can be useful if you have
a mail back end that has gotten out of sync.
Most select methods are pretty simple and self-explanatory:
(nntp "news.funet.fi")
Reading directly from the spool is even simpler:
(nnspool "")
As you can see, the first element in a select method is the name of the back end, and the second is the address, or name, if you will.
After these two elements, there may be an arbitrary number of
(variable form) pairs.
To go back to the first example—imagine that you want to read from port 15 on that machine. This is what the select method should look like then:
(nntp "news.funet.fi" (nntp-port-number 15))
You should read the documentation to each back end to find out what
variables are relevant, but here's an nnmh example:
nnmh is a mail back end that reads a spool-like structure. Say
you have two structures that you wish to access: One is your private
mail spool, and the other is a public one. Here's the possible spec for
your private mail:
(nnmh "private" (nnmh-directory "~/private/mail/"))
(This server is then called `private', but you may have guessed that.)
Here's the method for a public spool:
(nnmh "public"
(nnmh-directory "/usr/information/spool/")
(nnmh-get-new-mail nil))
If you are behind a firewall and only have access to the NNTP
server from the firewall machine, you can instruct Gnus to rlogin
on the firewall machine and telnet from there to the NNTP server.
Doing this can be rather fiddly, but your virtual server definition
should probably look something like this:
(nntp "firewall"
(nntp-open-connection-function nntp-open-via-rlogin-and-telnet)
(nntp-via-address "the.firewall.machine")
(nntp-address "the.real.nntp.host")
(nntp-end-of-line "\n"))
If you want to use the wonderful ssh program to provide a
compressed connection over the modem line, you could add the following
configuration to the example above:
(nntp-via-rlogin-command "ssh")
See also nntp-via-rlogin-command-switches.
If you're behind a firewall, but have direct access to the outside world through a wrapper command like "runsocks", you could open a socksified telnet connection to the news server as follows:
(nntp "outside"
(nntp-pre-command "runsocks")
(nntp-open-connection-function nntp-open-via-telnet)
(nntp-address "the.news.server")
(nntp-end-of-line "\n"))
This means that you have to have set up ssh-agent correctly to
provide automatic authorization, of course. And to get a compressed
connection, you have to have the `Compression' option in the
ssh config file.
If you're saving lots of articles in the cache by using persistent articles, you may want to create a virtual server to read the cache.
First you need to add a new server. The a command does that. It
would probably be best to use nnml to read the cache. You
could also use nnspool or nnmh, though.
Type a nnml RET cache RET.
You should now have a brand new nnml virtual server called
`cache'. You now need to edit it to have the right definitions.
Type e to edit the server. You'll be entered into a buffer that
will contain the following:
(nnml "cache")
Change that to:
(nnml "cache"
(nnml-directory "~/News/cache/")
(nnml-active-file "~/News/cache/active"))
Type C-c C-c to return to the server buffer. If you now press RET over this virtual server, you should be entered into a browse buffer, and you should be able to enter any of the groups displayed.
One sticky point when defining variables (both on back ends and in Emacs in general) is that some variables are typically initialized from other variables when the definition of the variables is being loaded. If you change the “base” variable after the variables have been loaded, you won't change the “derived” variables.
This typically affects directory and file variables. For instance,
nnml-directory is ~/Mail/ by default, and all nnml
directory variables are initialized from that variable, so
nnml-active-file will be ~/Mail/active. If you define a
new virtual nnml server, it will not suffice to set just
nnml-directory—you have to explicitly set all the file
variables to be what you want them to be. For a complete list of
variables for each back end, see each back end's section later in this
manual, but here's an example nnml definition:
(nnml "public"
(nnml-directory "~/my-mail/")
(nnml-active-file "~/my-mail/active")
(nnml-newsgroups-file "~/my-mail/newsgroups"))
Server variables are often called server parameters.
Wherever you would normally use a select method
(e.g. gnus-secondary-select-method, in the group select method,
when browsing a foreign server) you can use a virtual server name
instead. This could potentially save lots of typing. And it's nice all
over.
If a server seems to be unreachable, Gnus will mark that server as
denied. That means that any subsequent attempt to make contact
with that server will just be ignored. “It can't be opened,” Gnus
will tell you, without making the least effort to see whether that is
actually the case or not.
That might seem quite naughty, but it does make sense most of the time. Let's say you have 10 groups subscribed to on server `nephelococcygia.com'. This server is located somewhere quite far away from you and the machine is quite slow, so it takes 1 minute just to find out that it refuses connection to you today. If Gnus were to attempt to do that 10 times, you'd be quite annoyed, so Gnus won't attempt to do that. Once it has gotten a single “connection refused”, it will regard that server as “down”.
So, what happens if the machine was only feeling unwell temporarily? How do you test to see whether the machine has come up again?
You jump to the server buffer (see Server Buffer) and poke it with the following commands:
gnus-server-open-server).
gnus-server-close-server).
gnus-server-deny-server).
gnus-server-open-all-servers).
gnus-server-close-all-servers).
gnus-server-remove-denials).
gnus-server-offline-server).
A newsreader is normally used for reading news. Gnus currently provides only two methods of getting news—it can read from an NNTP server, or it can read from a local spool.
Subscribing to a foreign group from an NNTP server is rather easy.
You just specify nntp as method and the address of the NNTP
server as the, uhm, address.
If the NNTP server is located at a non-standard port, setting the third element of the select method to this port number should allow you to connect to the right port. You'll have to edit the group info for that (see Foreign Groups).
The name of the foreign group can be the same as a native group. In fact, you can subscribe to the same group from as many different servers you feel like. There will be no name collisions.
The following variables can be used to create a virtual nntp
server:
nntp-server-opened-hookMODE READER to the server with the
nntp-send-mode-reader function. This function should always be
present in this hook.
nntp-authinfo-functionnntp-send-authinfo, which looks
through your ~/.authinfo (or whatever you've set the
nntp-authinfo-file variable to) for applicable entries. If none
are found, it will prompt you for a login name and a password. The
format of the ~/.authinfo file is (almost) the same as the
ftp ~/.netrc file, which is defined in the ftp
manual page, but here are the salient facts:
The valid tokens include `machine', `login', `password',
`default'. In addition Gnus introduces two new tokens, not present
in the original .netrc/ftp syntax, namely `port' and
`force'. (This is the only way the .authinfo file format
deviates from the .netrc file format.) `port' is used to
indicate what port on the server the credentials apply to and
`force' is explained below.
Here's an example file:
machine news.uio.no login larsi password geheimnis
machine nntp.ifi.uio.no login larsi force yes
The token/value pairs may appear in any order; `machine' doesn't have to be first, for instance.
In this example, both login name and password have been supplied for the former server, while the latter has only the login name listed, and the user will be prompted for the password. The latter also has the `force' tag, which means that the authinfo will be sent to the nntp server upon connection; the default (i.e., when there is not `force' tag) is to not send authinfo to the nntp server until the nntp server asks for it.
You can also add `default' lines that will apply to all servers that don't have matching `machine' lines.
default force yes
This will force sending `AUTHINFO' commands to all servers not previously mentioned.
Remember to not leave the ~/.authinfo file world-readable.
nntp-server-action-alist (setq nntp-server-action-alist
'(("innd" (ding))))
You probably don't want to do that, though.
The default value is
'(("nntpd 1\\.5\\.11t"
(remove-hook 'nntp-server-opened-hook
'nntp-send-mode-reader)))
This ensures that Gnus doesn't send the MODE READER command to
nntpd 1.5.11t, since that command chokes that server, I've been told.
nntp-maximum-requesthead commands. To
speed things up, the back end sends lots of these commands without
waiting for reply, and then reads all the replies. This is controlled
by the nntp-maximum-request variable, and is 400 by default. If
your network is buggy, you should set this to 1.
nntp-connection-timeoutnntp groups that you connect to
regularly, you're sure to have problems with NNTP servers not
responding properly, or being too loaded to reply within reasonable
time. This is can lead to awkward problems, which can be helped
somewhat by setting nntp-connection-timeout. This is an integer
that says how many seconds the nntp back end should wait for a
connection before giving up. If it is nil, which is the default,
no timeouts are done.
nntp-nov-is-evilt, but nntp usually checks automatically whether NOV
can be used.
nntp-xover-commands("XOVER"
"XOVERVIEW").
nntp-nov-gapnntp normally sends just one big request for NOV lines to
the server. The server responds with one huge list of lines. However,
if you have read articles 2-5000 in the group, and only want to read
article 1 and 5001, that means that nntp will fetch 4999 NOV
lines that you will not need. This variable says how
big a gap between two consecutive articles is allowed to be before the
XOVER request is split into several request. Note that if your
network is fast, setting this variable to a really small number means
that fetching will probably be slower. If this variable is nil,
nntp will never split requests. The default is 5.
nntp-prepare-server-hooknntp-record-commandsnil, nntp will log all commands it sends to the
NNTP server (along with a timestamp) in the `*nntp-log*'
buffer. This is useful if you are debugging a Gnus/NNTP connection
that doesn't seem to work.
nntp-open-connection-functionnntp-open-connection-function
parameter, Gnus will use that function to establish the connection.
Six pre-made functions are supplied. These functions can be grouped in
two categories: direct connection functions (four pre-made), and
indirect ones (two pre-made).
nntp-never-echoes-commandsnil means the nntp server never echoes commands. It is
reported that some nntps server doesn't echo commands. So, you may want
to set this to non-nil in the method for such a server setting
nntp-open-connection-function to nntp-open-ssl-stream for
example. The default value is nil. Note that the
nntp-open-connection-functions-never-echo-commands variable
overrides the nil value of this variable.
nntp-open-connection-functions-never-echo-commandsnntp-open-connection-function to this list if it does
not echo commands. Note that a non-nil value of the
nntp-never-echoes-commands variable overrides this variable. The
default value is (nntp-open-network-stream).
nntp-prepare-post-hookMessage-ID header in the article and the news server provides the
recommended ID, it will be added to the article before running this
hook. It is useful to make Cancel-Lock headers even if you
inhibit Gnus to add a Message-ID header, you could say:
(add-hook 'nntp-prepare-post-hook 'canlock-insert-header)
Note that not all servers support the recommended ID. This works for INN versions 2.3.0 and later, for instance.
These functions are called direct because they open a direct connection between your machine and the NNTP server. The behavior of these functions is also affected by commonly understood variables (see Common Variables).
nntp-open-network-streamnntp-open-tls-stream;; "nntps" is port 563 and is predefined in our /etc/services ;; however, `gnutls-cli -p' doesn't like named ports. ;; (nntp "snews.bar.com" (nntp-open-connection-function nntp-open-tls-stream) (nntp-port-number ) (nntp-address "snews.bar.com"))
nntp-open-ssl-stream;; "snews" is port 563 and is predefined in our /etc/services ;; however, `openssl s_client -port' doesn't like named ports. ;; (nntp "snews.bar.com" (nntp-open-connection-function nntp-open-ssl-stream) (nntp-port-number 563) (nntp-address "snews.bar.com"))
nntp-open-telnet-streamnntp-open-network-stream which would do the job. (One
of) the reason(s) is that if you are behind a firewall but have direct
connections to the outside world thanks to a command wrapper like
runsocks, you can use it like this:
(nntp "socksified"
(nntp-pre-command "runsocks")
(nntp-open-connection-function nntp-open-telnet-stream)
(nntp-address "the.news.server"))
With the default method, you would need to wrap your whole Emacs session, which is not a good idea.
These functions are called indirect because they connect to an intermediate host before actually connecting to the NNTP server. All of these functions and related variables are also said to belong to the “via” family of connection: they're all prefixed with “via” to make things cleaner. The behavior of these functions is also affected by commonly understood variables (see Common Variables).
nntp-open-via-rlogin-and-telnetnntp-open-via-rlogin-and-telnet-specific variables:
nntp-via-rlogin-commandnntp-via-rlogin-command-switchesnntp-via-rlogin-command. The default is nil. If you use
`ssh' for nntp-via-rlogin-command, you may set this to
`("-C")' in order to compress all data connections, otherwise set
this to `("-t" "-e" "none")' or `("-C" "-t" "-e" "none")' if
the telnet command requires a pseudo-tty allocation on an intermediate
host.
nntp-open-via-telnet-and-telnetnntp-open-via-telnet-and-telnet-specific variables:
nntp-via-telnet-commandtelnet the intermediate host. The default is
`telnet'.
nntp-via-telnet-switchesnntp-via-telnet-command command. The default is `("-8")'.
nntp-via-user-passwordnntp-via-envusernil, the intermediate telnet session (client and
server both) will support the ENVIRON option and not prompt for
login name. This works for Solaris telnet, for instance.
nntp-via-shell-promptHere are some additional variables that are understood by all the above functions:
nntp-via-user-namenntp-via-addressThe following variables affect the behavior of all, or several of the
pre-made connection functions. When not specified, all functions are
affected (the values of the following variables will be used as the
default if each virtual nntp server doesn't specify those server
variables individually).
nntp-pre-commandnntp-open-network-stream,
nntp-open-tls-stream, and nntp-open-ssl-stream). This is
where you would put a `SOCKS' wrapper for instance.
nntp-addressnntp-port-numbernntp-end-of-linenntp-telnet-commandnntp-telnet-switchesnntp-telnet-command. The default
is `("-8")'.
Subscribing to a foreign group from the local spool is extremely easy, and might be useful, for instance, to speed up reading groups that contain very big articles—`alt.binaries.pictures.furniture', for instance.
Anyway, you just specify nnspool as the method and "" (or
anything else) as the address.
If you have access to a local spool, you should probably use that as the
native select method (see Finding the News). It is normally faster
than using an nntp select method, but might not be. It depends.
You just have to try to find out what's best at your site.
nnspool-inews-programnnspool-inews-switchesnnspool-spool-directorynnspool looks for the articles. This is normally
/usr/spool/news/.
nnspool-nov-directorynnspool will look for NOV files. This is normallynnspool-lib-dirnnspool-active-filennspool-newsgroups-filennspool-history-filennspool-active-times-filennspool-nov-is-evilnil, nnspool won't try to use any NOV files
that it finds.
nnspool-sift-nov-with-sednil, which is the default, use sed to get the
relevant portion from the overview file. If nil,
nnspool will load the entire file into a buffer and process it
there.
Reading mail with a newsreader—isn't that just plain WeIrD? But of course.
If you are used to traditional mail readers, but have decided to switch to reading mail with Gnus, you may find yourself experiencing something of a culture shock.
Gnus does not behave like traditional mail readers. If you want to make it behave that way, you can, but it's an uphill battle.
Gnus, by default, handles all its groups using the same approach. This approach is very newsreaderly—you enter a group, see the new/unread messages, and when you read the messages, they get marked as read, and you don't see them any more. (Unless you explicitly ask for them.)
In particular, you do not do anything explicitly to delete messages.
Does this mean that all the messages that have been marked as read are deleted? How awful!
But, no, it means that old messages are expired according to some scheme or other. For news messages, the expire process is controlled by the news administrator; for mail, the expire process is controlled by you. The expire process for mail is covered in depth in Expiring Mail.
What many Gnus users find, after using it a while for both news and mail, is that the transport mechanism has very little to do with how they want to treat a message.
Many people subscribe to several mailing lists. These are transported via SMTP, and are therefore mail. But we might go for weeks without answering, or even reading these messages very carefully. We may not need to save them because if we should need to read one again, they are archived somewhere else.
Some people have local news groups which have only a handful of readers. These are transported via NNTP, and are therefore news. But we may need to read and answer a large fraction of the messages very carefully in order to do our work. And there may not be an archive, so we may need to save the interesting messages the same way we would personal mail.
The important distinction turns out to be not the transport mechanism, but other factors such as how interested we are in the subject matter, or how easy it is to retrieve the message if we need to read it again.
Gnus provides many options for sorting mail into “groups” which behave like newsgroups, and for treating each group (whether mail or news) differently.
Some users never get comfortable using the Gnus (ahem) paradigm and wish that Gnus should grow up and be a male, er, mail reader. It is possible to whip Gnus into a more mailreaderly being, but, as said before, it's not easy. People who prefer proper mail readers should try vm instead, which is an excellent, and proper, mail reader.
I don't mean to scare anybody off, but I want to make it clear that you may be required to learn a new way of thinking about messages. After you've been subjected to The Gnus Way, you will come to love it. I can guarantee it. (At least the guy who sold me the Emacs Subliminal Brain-Washing Functions that I've put into Gnus did guarantee it. You Will Be Assimilated. You Love Gnus. You Love The Gnus Mail Way. You Do.)
It's quite easy to use Gnus to read your new mail. You just plonk the
mail back end of your choice into gnus-secondary-select-methods,
and things will happen automatically.
For instance, if you want to use nnml (which is a “one file per
mail” back end), you could put the following in your ~/.gnus.el file:
(setq gnus-secondary-select-methods '((nnml "")))
Now, the next time you start Gnus, this back end will be queried for new articles, and it will move all the messages in your spool file to its directory, which is ~/Mail/ by default. The new group that will be created (`mail.misc') will be subscribed, and you can read it like any other group.
You will probably want to split the mail into several groups, though:
(setq nnmail-split-methods
'(("junk" "^From:.*Lars Ingebrigtsen")
("crazy" "^Subject:.*die\\|^Organization:.*flabby")
("other" "")))
This will result in three new nnml mail groups being created:
`nnml:junk', `nnml:crazy', and `nnml:other'. All the
mail that doesn't fit into the first two groups will be placed in the
last group.
This should be sufficient for reading mail with Gnus. You might want to give the other sections in this part of the manual a perusal, though. Especially see Choosing a Mail Back End and see Expiring Mail.
The nnmail-split-methods variable says how the incoming mail is
to be split into groups.
(setq nnmail-split-methods
'(("mail.junk" "^From:.*Lars Ingebrigtsen")
("mail.crazy" "^Subject:.*die\\|^Organization:.*flabby")
("mail.other" "")))
This variable is a list of lists, where the first element of each of
these lists is the name of the mail group (they do not have to be called
something beginning with `mail', by the way), and the second
element is a regular expression used on the header of each mail to
determine if it belongs in this mail group. The first string may
contain `\\1' forms, like the ones used by replace-match to
insert sub-expressions from the matched text. For instance:
("list.\\1" "From:.* \\(.*\\)-list@majordomo.com")
In that case, nnmail-split-lowercase-expanded controls whether
the inserted text should be made lowercase. See Fancy Mail Splitting.
The second element can also be a function. In that case, it will be
called narrowed to the headers with the first element of the rule as the
argument. It should return a non-nil value if it thinks that the
mail belongs in that group.
The last of these groups should always be a general one, and the regular
expression should always be `""' so that it matches any mails
that haven't been matched by any of the other regexps. (These rules are
processed from the beginning of the alist toward the end. The first rule
to make a match will “win”, unless you have crossposting enabled. In
that case, all matching rules will “win”.) If no rule matched, the mail
will end up in the `bogus' group. When new groups are created by
splitting mail, you may want to run gnus-group-find-new-groups to
see the new groups. This also applies to the `bogus' group.
If you like to tinker with this yourself, you can set this variable to a function of your choice. This function will be called without any arguments in a buffer narrowed to the headers of an incoming mail message. The function should return a list of group names that it thinks should carry this mail message.
Note that the mail back ends are free to maul the poor, innocent,
incoming headers all they want to. They all add Lines headers;
some add X-Gnus-Group headers; most rename the Unix mbox
From<SPACE> line to something else.
The mail back ends all support cross-posting. If several regexps match,
the mail will be “cross-posted” to all those groups.
nnmail-crosspost says whether to use this mechanism or not. Note
that no articles are crossposted to the general (`""') group.
nnmh and nnml makes crossposts by creating hard links to
the crossposted articles. However, not all file systems support hard
links. If that's the case for you, set
nnmail-crosspost-link-function to copy-file. (This
variable is add-name-to-file by default.)
If you wish to see where the previous mail split put the messages, you
can use the M-x nnmail-split-history command. If you wish to see
where re-spooling messages would put the messages, you can use
gnus-summary-respool-trace and related commands (see Mail Group Commands).
Header lines longer than the value of
nnmail-split-header-length-limit are excluded from the split
function.
By default, splitting MIME-decodes headers so you
can match on non-ASCII strings. The
nnmail-mail-splitting-charset variable specifies the default
charset for decoding. The behavior can be turned off completely by
binding nnmail-mail-splitting-decodes to nil, which is
useful if you want to match articles based on the raw header data.
By default, splitting is performed on all incoming messages. If you
specify a directory entry for the variable mail-sources
(see Mail Source Specifiers), however, then splitting does
not happen by default. You can set the variable
nnmail-resplit-incoming to a non-nil value to make
splitting happen even in this case. (This variable has no effect on
other kinds of entries.)
Gnus gives you all the opportunity you could possibly want for shooting yourself in the foot. Let's say you create a group that will contain all the mail you get from your boss. And then you accidentally unsubscribe from the group. Gnus will still put all the mail from your boss in the unsubscribed group, and so, when your boss mails you “Have that report ready by Monday or you're fired!”, you'll never see it and, come Tuesday, you'll still believe that you're gainfully employed while you really should be out collecting empty bottles to save up for next month's rent money.
Mail can be gotten from many different sources—the mail spool, from a POP mail server, from a procmail directory, or from a maildir, for instance.
You tell Gnus how to fetch mail by setting mail-sources
(see Fetching Mail) to a mail source specifier.
Here's an example:
(pop :server "pop3.mailserver.com" :user "myname")
As can be observed, a mail source specifier is a list where the first element is a mail source type, followed by an arbitrary number of keywords. Keywords that are not explicitly specified are given default values.
The following mail source types are available:
fileKeywords:
:pathrmail-spool-directory
(usually something like /usr/mail/spool/user-name).
:prescript:postscriptAn example file mail source:
(file :path "/usr/spool/mail/user-name")
Or using the default file name:
(file)
If the mail spool file is not located on the local machine, it's best to use POP or IMAP or the like to fetch the mail. You can not use ange-ftp file names here—it has no way to lock the mail spool while moving the mail.
If it's impossible to set up a proper server, you can use ssh instead.
(setq mail-sources
'((file :prescript "ssh host bin/getmail >%t")))
The `getmail' script would look something like the following:
#!/bin/sh
# getmail - move mail from spool to stdout
# flu@iki.fi
MOVEMAIL=/usr/lib/emacs/20.3/i386-redhat-linux/movemail
TMP=$HOME/Mail/tmp
rm -f $TMP; $MOVEMAIL $MAIL $TMP >/dev/null && cat $TMP
Alter this script to fit the `movemail' and temporary
file you want to use.
directoryfoo.bar. (You can change the suffix
to be used instead of .spool.) Setting
nnmail-scan-directory-mail-source-once to non-nil forces
Gnus to scan the mail source only once. This is particularly useful
if you want to scan mail groups at a specified level.
There is also the variable nnmail-resplit-incoming, if you set
that to a non-nil value, then the normal splitting process is
applied to all the files from the directory, Splitting Mail.
Keywords:
:path:suffix:predicatenil are returned.
The default is identity. This is used as an additional
filter—only files that have the right suffix and satisfy this
predicate are considered.
:prescript:postscriptAn example directory mail source:
(directory :path "/home/user-name/procmail-dir/"
:suffix ".prcml")
popKeywords:
:server:port:user:password:programformat-like string. Here's an example:
fetchmail %u@%s -P %p %t
The valid format specifier characters are:
The values used for these specs are taken from the values you give the
corresponding keywords.
:prescript:program keyword. This can also be a function to be run.
:postscript:program keyword. This can also be a function to be run.
:function:authenticationpassword or the symbol apop
and says what authentication scheme to use. The default is
password.
If the :program and :function keywords aren't specified,
pop3-movemail will be used. If pop3-leave-mail-on-server
is non-nil the mail is to be left on the POP server
after fetching when using pop3-movemail. Note that POP servers
maintain no state information between sessions, so what the client
believes is there and what is actually there may not match up. If they
do not, then you may get duplicate mails or the whole thing can fall
apart and leave you with a corrupt mailbox.
Here are some examples for getting mail from a POP server. Fetch from the default POP server, using the default user name, and default fetcher:
(pop)
Fetch from a named server with a named user and password:
(pop :server "my.pop.server"
:user "user-name" :password "secret")
Use `movemail' to move the mail:
(pop :program "movemail po:%u %t %p")
maildirKeywords:
:path:subdirsYou can also get mails from remote hosts (because maildirs don't suffer from locking problems).
Two example maildir mail sources:
(maildir :path "/home/user-name/Maildir/"
:subdirs ("cur" "new"))
(maildir :path "/user@remotehost.org:~/Maildir/"
:subdirs ("new"))
imapNote that for the Kerberos, GSSAPI, TLS/SSL and STARTTLS support you may need external programs and libraries, See IMAP.
Keywords:
:server:port:user:password:streamimap-stream-alist. Right now, this means
`gssapi', `kerberos4', `starttls', `tls',
`ssl', `shell' or the default `network'.
:authenticationimap-authenticator-alist. Right now,
this means `gssapi', `kerberos4', `digest-md5',
`cram-md5', `anonymous' or the default `login'.
:programimap-shell-program variable. This should be a
format-like string (or list of strings). Here's an example:
ssh %s imapd
The valid format specifier characters are:
imap-default-user.
The values used for these specs are taken from the values you give the
corresponding keywords.
:mailbox:predicate:fetchflag:dontexpungenil, don't remove all articles marked as deleted in the
mailbox after finishing the fetch.
An example IMAP mail source:
(imap :server "mail.mycorp.com"
:stream kerberos4
:fetchflag "\\Seen")
webmailNOTE: Webmail largely depends on cookies. A "one-line-cookie" patch is required for url "4.0pre.46".
WARNING: Mails may be lost. NO WARRANTY.
Keywords:
:subtypehotmail. The
alternatives are netscape, netaddress, my-deja.
:user:password:dontexpungenil, only fetch unread articles and don't move them to
trash folder after finishing the fetch.
An example webmail source:
(webmail :subtype 'hotmail
:user "user-name"
:password "secret")
Keywords:
:pluggednil, fetch the mail even when Gnus is unplugged. If you
use directory source to get mail, you can specify it as in this
example:
(setq mail-sources
'((directory :path "/home/pavel/.Spool/"
:suffix ""
:plugged t)))
Gnus will then fetch your mail even when you are unplugged. This is useful when you use local mail and news.
Some of the above keywords specify a Lisp function to be executed.
For each keyword :foo, the Lisp variable foo is bound to
the value of the keyword while the function is executing. For example,
consider the following mail-source setting:
(setq mail-sources '((pop :user "jrl"
:server "pophost" :function fetchfunc)))
While the function fetchfunc is executing, the symbol user
is bound to "jrl", and the symbol server is bound to
"pophost". The symbols port, password,
program, prescript, postscript, function,
and authentication are also bound (to their default values).
See above for a list of keywords for each type of mail source.
The following is a list of variables that influence how the mail is fetched. You would normally not need to set or change any of these variables.
mail-source-crash-boxmail-source-delete-incomingnil, delete incoming files after handling them. If
t, delete the files immediately, if nil, never delete any
files. If a positive number, delete files older than number of days
(This will only happen, when receiving new mail). You may also set
mail-source-delete-incoming to nil and call
mail-source-delete-old-incoming from a hook or interactively.
mail-source-delete-old-incoming-confirmnil, ask for confirmation before deleting old incoming
files. This variable only applies when
mail-source-delete-incoming is a positive number.
mail-source-ignore-errorsnil, ignore errors when reading mail from a mail source.
mail-source-directorymail-source-delete-incoming is nil or a number.
mail-source-incoming-file-prefixmail-source-delete-incoming is nil or a
number.
mail-source-default-file-modesmail-source-movemail-programnil, name of program for fetching new mail. If
nil, movemail in exec-directory.
The way to actually tell Gnus where to get new mail from is to set
mail-sources to a list of mail source specifiers
(see Mail Source Specifiers).
If this variable (and the obsolescent nnmail-spool-file) is
nil, the mail back ends will never attempt to fetch mail by
themselves.
If you want to fetch mail both from your local spool as well as a POP mail server, you'd say something like:
(setq mail-sources
'((file)
(pop :server "pop3.mail.server"
:password "secret")))
Or, if you don't want to use any of the keyword defaults:
(setq mail-sources
'((file :path "/var/spool/mail/user-name")
(pop :server "pop3.mail.server"
:user "user-name"
:port "pop3"
:password "secret")))
When you use a mail back end, Gnus will slurp all your mail from your inbox and plonk it down in your home directory. Gnus doesn't move any mail if you're not using a mail back end—you have to do a lot of magic invocations first. At the time when you have finished drawing the pentagram, lightened the candles, and sacrificed the goat, you really shouldn't be too surprised when Gnus moves your mail.
These variables are (for the most part) pertinent to all the various mail back ends.
nnmail-read-incoming-hooknnmail-split-hookgnus-article-decode-encoded-words is one likely function to add
to this hook.
nnmail-pre-get-new-mail-hooknnmail-post-get-new-mail-hooknnmail-pre-get-new-mail-hook (is called just before
starting to handle the new mail) and
nnmail-post-get-new-mail-hook (is called when the mail handling
is done). Here's and example of using these two hooks to change the
default file modes the new mail files get:
(add-hook 'nnmail-pre-get-new-mail-hook
(lambda () (set-default-file-modes 511)))
(add-hook 'nnmail-post-get-new-mail-hook
(lambda () (set-default-file-modes 551)))
nnmail-use-long-file-namesnil, the mail back ends will use long file and directory
names. Groups like `mail.misc' will end up in directories
(assuming use of nnml back end) or files (assuming use of
nnfolder back end) like mail.misc. If it is nil,
the same group will end up in mail/misc.
nnmail-delete-file-functiondelete-file by default.
nnmail-cache-accepted-message-idsnil, put the Message-IDs of articles imported into
the back end (via Gcc, for instance) into the mail duplication
discovery cache. The default is nil.
nnmail-cache-ignore-groupsMessage-ID cache.
This can be useful, for example, when using Fancy Splitting
(see Fancy Mail Splitting) together with the function
nnmail-split-fancy-with-parent.
If the rather simple, standard method for specifying how to split mail
doesn't allow you to do what you want, you can set
nnmail-split-methods to nnmail-split-fancy. Then you can
play with the nnmail-split-fancy variable.
Let's look at an example value of this variable first:
;; Messages from the mailer daemon are not crossposted to any of ;; the ordinary groups. Warnings are put in a separate group ;; from real errors. (| ("from" mail (| ("subject" "warn.*" "mail.warning") "mail.misc")) ;; Non-error messages are crossposted to all relevant ;; groups, but we don't crosspost between the group for the ;; (ding) list and the group for other (ding) related mail. (& (| (any "ding@ifi\\.uio\\.no" "ding.list") ("subject" "ding" "ding.misc")) ;; Other mailing lists... (any "procmail@informatik\\.rwth-aachen\\.de" "procmail.list") (any "SmartList@informatik\\.rwth-aachen\\.de" "SmartList.list") ;; Both lists below have the same suffix, so prevent ;; cross-posting to mkpkg.list of messages posted only to ;; the bugs- list, but allow cross-posting when the ;; message was really cross-posted. (any "bugs-mypackage@somewhere" "mypkg.bugs") (any "mypackage@somewhere" - "bugs-mypackage" "mypkg.list") ;; People... (any "larsi@ifi\\.uio\\.no" "people.Lars_Magne_Ingebrigtsen")) ;; Unmatched mail goes to the catch all group. "misc.misc")
This variable has the format of a split. A split is a (possibly) recursive structure where each split may contain other splits. Here are the possible split syntaxes:
group(field value [- restrict [...] ] split [invert-partial])If restrict (yet another regexp) matches some string after field and before the end of the matched value, the split is ignored. If none of the restrict clauses match, split is processed.
The last element invert-partial is optional. If it is
non-nil, the match-partial-words behavior controlled by the
variable nnmail-split-fancy-match-partial-words (see below) is
be inverted. (New in Gnus 5.10.7)
(| split ...)| (vertical
bar), then process each split until one of them matches. A
split is said to match if it will cause the mail message to be
stored in one or more groups.
(& split ...)&, then
process all splits in the list.
junkjunk, then don't save (i.e., delete)
this message. Use with extreme caution.
(: function arg1 arg2 ...)For instance, the following function could be used to split based on the body of the messages:
(defun split-on-body ()
(save-excursion
(save-restriction
(widen)
(goto-char (point-min))
(when (re-search-forward "Some.*string" nil t)
"string.group"))))
The buffer is narrowed to the message in question when function
is run. That's why (widen) needs to be called after
save-excursion and save-restriction in the example
above. Also note that with the nnimap backend, message bodies will
not be downloaded by default. You need to set
nnimap-split-download-body to t to do that
(see Splitting in IMAP).
(! func split)!, then
split will be processed, and func will be called as a
function with the result of split as argument. func
should return a split.
nilnil, it is ignored.
In these splits, field must match a complete field name.
Normally, value in these splits must match a complete word
according to the fundamental mode syntax table. In other words, all
value's will be implicitly surrounded by \<...\> markers,
which are word delimiters. Therefore, if you use the following split,
for example,
(any "joe" "joemail")
messages sent from `joedavis@foo.org' will normally not be filed in `joemail'. If you want to alter this behavior, you can use any of the following three ways:
nnmail-split-fancy-match-partial-words variable
to non-nil in order to ignore word boundaries and instead the
match becomes more like a grep. This variable controls whether partial
words are matched during fancy splitting. The default value is
nil.
Note that it influences all value's in your split rules.
.* ignores word boundaries in front of
a word. Similarly, if value ends with .*, word boundaries
in the rear of a word will be ignored. For example, the value
"@example\\.com" does not match `foo@example.com' but
".*@example\\.com" does.
nnmail-split-fancy-match-partial-words is
nil. Contrarily, if the flag is set, word boundaries are not
ignored even if nnmail-split-fancy-match-partial-words is
non-nil. (New in Gnus 5.10.7)
field and value can also be Lisp symbols, in that case
they are expanded as specified by the variable
nnmail-split-abbrev-alist. This is an alist of cons cells,
where the car of a cell contains the key, and the cdr
contains the associated value. Predefined entries in
nnmail-split-abbrev-alist include:
fromtoanyfrom and to entries.
nnmail-split-fancy-syntax-table is the syntax table in effect
when all this splitting is performed.
If you want to have Gnus create groups dynamically based on some
information in the headers (i.e., do replace-match-like
substitutions in the group names), you can say things like:
(any "debian-\\b\\(\\w+\\)@lists.debian.org" "mail.debian.\\1")
In this example, messages sent to `debian-foo@lists.debian.org' will be filed in `mail.debian.foo'.
If the string contains the element `\&', then the previously matched string will be substituted. Similarly, the elements `\\1' up to `\\9' will be substituted with the text matched by the groupings 1 through 9.
Where nnmail-split-lowercase-expanded controls whether the
lowercase of the matched string should be used for the substitution.
Setting it as non-nil is useful to avoid the creation of multiple
groups when users send to an address using different case
(i.e. mailing-list@domain vs Mailing-List@Domain). The default value
is t.
nnmail-split-fancy-with-parent is a function which allows you to
split followups into the same groups their parents are in. Sometimes
you can't make splitting rules for all your mail. For example, your
boss might send you personal mail regarding different projects you are
working on, and as you can't tell your boss to put a distinguishing
string into the subject line, you have to resort to manually moving the
messages into the right group. With this function, you only have to do
it once per thread.
To use this feature, you have to set nnmail-treat-duplicates
and nnmail-cache-accepted-message-ids to a non-nil
value. And then you can include nnmail-split-fancy-with-parent
using the colon feature, like so:
(setq nnmail-treat-duplicates 'warn ; or delete
nnmail-cache-accepted-message-ids t
nnmail-split-fancy
'(| (: nnmail-split-fancy-with-parent)
;; other splits go here
))
This feature works as follows: when nnmail-treat-duplicates is
non-nil, Gnus records the message id of every message it sees
in the file specified by the variable
nnmail-message-id-cache-file, together with the group it is in
(the group is omitted for non-mail messages). When mail splitting is
invoked, the function nnmail-split-fancy-with-parent then looks
at the References (and In-Reply-To) header of each message to split
and searches the file specified by nnmail-message-id-cache-file
for the message ids. When it has found a parent, it returns the
corresponding group name unless the group name matches the regexp
nnmail-split-fancy-with-parent-ignore-groups. It is
recommended that you set nnmail-message-id-cache-length to a
somewhat higher number than the default so that the message ids are
still in the cache. (A value of 5000 appears to create a file some
300 kBytes in size.)
When nnmail-cache-accepted-message-ids is non-nil, Gnus
also records the message ids of moved articles, so that the followup
messages goes into the new group.
Also see the variable nnmail-cache-ignore-groups if you don't
want certain groups to be recorded in the cache. For example, if all
outgoing messages are written to an “outgoing” group, you could set
nnmail-cache-ignore-groups to match that group name.
Otherwise, answers to all your messages would end up in the
“outgoing” group.
If you subscribe to dozens of mailing lists but you don't want to
maintain mail splitting rules manually, group mail splitting is for you.
You just have to set to-list and/or to-address in group
parameters or group customization and set nnmail-split-methods to
gnus-group-split. This splitting function will scan all groups
for those parameters and split mail accordingly, i.e., messages posted
from or to the addresses specified in the parameters to-list or
to-address of a mail group will be stored in that group.
Sometimes, mailing lists have multiple addresses, and you may want mail
splitting to recognize them all: just set the extra-aliases group
parameter to the list of additional addresses and it's done. If you'd
rather use a regular expression, set split-regexp.
All these parameters in a group will be used to create an
nnmail-split-fancy split, in which the field is `any',
the value is a single regular expression that matches
to-list, to-address, all of extra-aliases and all
matches of split-regexp, and the split is the name of the
group. restricts are also supported: just set the
split-exclude parameter to a list of regular expressions.
If you can't get the right split to be generated using all these
parameters, or you just need something fancier, you can set the
parameter split-spec to an nnmail-split-fancy split. In
this case, all other aforementioned parameters will be ignored by
gnus-group-split. In particular, split-spec may be set to
nil, in which case the group will be ignored by
gnus-group-split.
gnus-group-split will do cross-posting on all groups that match,
by defining a single & fancy split containing one split for each
group. If a message doesn't match any split, it will be stored in the
group named in gnus-group-split-default-catch-all-group, unless
some group has split-spec set to catch-all, in which case
that group is used as the catch-all group. Even though this variable is
often used just to name a group, it may also be set to an arbitrarily
complex fancy split (after all, a group name is a fancy split), and this
may be useful to split mail that doesn't go to any mailing list to
personal mail folders. Note that this fancy split is added as the last
element of a | split list that also contains a & split
with the rules extracted from group parameters.
It's time for an example. Assume the following group parameters have been defined:
nnml:mail.bar:
((to-address . "bar@femail.com")
(split-regexp . ".*@femail\\.com"))
nnml:mail.foo:
((to-list . "foo@nowhere.gov")
(extra-aliases "foo@localhost" "foo-redist@home")
(split-exclude "bugs-foo" "rambling-foo")
(admin-address . "foo-request@nowhere.gov"))
nnml:mail.others:
((split-spec . catch-all))
Setting nnmail-split-methods to gnus-group-split will
behave as if nnmail-split-fancy had been selected and variable
nnmail-split-fancy had been set as follows:
(| (& (any "\\(bar@femail\\.com\\|.*@femail\\.com\\)" "mail.bar")
(any "\\(foo@nowhere\\.gov\\|foo@localhost\\|foo-redist@home\\)"
- "bugs-foo" - "rambling-foo" "mail.foo"))
"mail.others")
If you'd rather not use group splitting for all your mail groups, you
may use it for only some of them, by using nnmail-split-fancy
splits like this:
(: gnus-group-split-fancy groups no-crosspost catch-all)
groups may be a regular expression or a list of group names whose
parameters will be scanned to generate the output split.
no-crosspost can be used to disable cross-posting; in this case, a
single | split will be output. catch-all is the fall back
fancy split, used like gnus-group-split-default-catch-all-group.
If catch-all is nil, or if split-regexp matches the
empty string in any selected group, no catch-all split will be issued.
Otherwise, if some group has split-spec set to catch-all,
this group will override the value of the catch-all argument.
Unfortunately, scanning all groups and their parameters can be quite
slow, especially considering that it has to be done for every message.
But don't despair! The function gnus-group-split-setup can be
used to enable gnus-group-split in a much more efficient way. It
sets nnmail-split-methods to nnmail-split-fancy and sets
nnmail-split-fancy to the split produced by
gnus-group-split-fancy. Thus, the group parameters are only
scanned once, no matter how many messages are split.
However, if you change group parameters, you'd have to update
nnmail-split-fancy manually. You can do it by running
gnus-group-split-update. If you'd rather have it updated
automatically, just tell gnus-group-split-setup to do it for
you. For example, add to your ~/.gnus.el:
(gnus-group-split-setup auto-update catch-all)
If auto-update is non-nil, gnus-group-split-update
will be added to nnmail-pre-get-new-mail-hook, so you won't ever
have to worry about updating nnmail-split-fancy again. If you
don't omit catch-all (it's optional, equivalent to nil),
gnus-group-split-default-catch-all-group will be set to its
value.
Because you may want to change nnmail-split-fancy after it is set
by gnus-group-split-update, this function will run
gnus-group-split-updated-hook just before finishing.
Most people have lots of old mail stored in various file formats. If you have set up Gnus to read mail using one of the spiffy Gnus mail back ends, you'll probably wish to have that old mail incorporated into your mail groups.
Doing so can be quite easy.
To take an example: You're reading mail using nnml
(see Mail Spool), and have set nnmail-split-methods to a
satisfactory value (see Splitting Mail). You have an old Unix mbox
file filled with important, but old, mail. You want to move it into
your nnml groups.
Here's how:
nndoc group from the mbox file (see Foreign Groups).
All the mail messages in the mbox file will now also be spread out over
all your nnml groups. Try entering them and check whether things
have gone without a glitch. If things look ok, you may consider
deleting the mbox file, but I wouldn't do that unless I was absolutely
sure that all the mail has ended up where it should be.
Respooling is also a handy thing to do if you're switching from one mail back end to another. Just respool all the mail in the old mail groups using the new mail back end.
Traditional mail readers have a tendency to remove mail articles when you mark them as read, in some way. Gnus takes a fundamentally different approach to mail reading.
Gnus basically considers mail just to be news that has been received in a rather peculiar manner. It does not think that it has the power to actually change the mail, or delete any mail messages. If you enter a mail group, and mark articles as “read”, or kill them in some other fashion, the mail articles will still exist on the system. I repeat: Gnus will not delete your old, read mail. Unless you ask it to, of course.
To make Gnus get rid of your unwanted mail, you have to mark the articles as expirable. (With the default key bindings, this means that you have to type E.) This does not mean that the articles will disappear right away, however. In general, a mail article will be deleted from your system if, 1) it is marked as expirable, AND 2) it is more than one week old. If you do not mark an article as expirable, it will remain on your system until hell freezes over. This bears repeating one more time, with some spurious capitalizations: IF you do NOT mark articles as EXPIRABLE, Gnus will NEVER delete those ARTICLES.
You do not have to mark articles as expirable by hand. Gnus provides two features, called “auto-expire” and “total-expire”, that can help you with this. In a nutshell, “auto-expire” means that Gnus hits E for you when you select an article. And “total-expire” means that Gnus considers all articles as expirable that are read. So, in addition to the articles marked `E', also the articles marked `r', `R', `O', `K', `Y' and so on are considered expirable.
When should either auto-expire or total-expire be used? Most people who are subscribed to mailing lists split each list into its own group and then turn on auto-expire or total-expire for those groups. (See Splitting Mail, for more information on splitting each list into its own group.)
Which one is better, auto-expire or total-expire? It's not easy to answer. Generally speaking, auto-expire is probably faster. Another advantage of auto-expire is that you get more marks to work with: for the articles that are supposed to stick around, you can still choose between tick and dormant and read marks. But with total-expire, you only have dormant and ticked to choose from. The advantage of total-expire is that it works well with adaptive scoring (see Adaptive Scoring). Auto-expire works with normal scoring but not with adaptive scoring.
Groups that match the regular expression
gnus-auto-expirable-newsgroups will have all articles that you
read marked as expirable automatically. All articles marked as
expirable have an `E' in the first column in the summary buffer.
By default, if you have auto expiry switched on, Gnus will mark all the articles you read as expirable, no matter if they were read or unread before. To avoid having articles marked as read marked as expirable automatically, you can put something like the following in your ~/.gnus.el file:
(remove-hook 'gnus-mark-article-hook
'gnus-summary-mark-read-and-unread-as-read)
(add-hook 'gnus-mark-article-hook 'gnus-summary-mark-unread-as-read)
Note that making a group auto-expirable doesn't mean that all read articles are expired—only the articles marked as expirable will be expired. Also note that using the d command won't make articles expirable—only semi-automatic marking of articles as read will mark the articles as expirable in auto-expirable groups.
Let's say you subscribe to a couple of mailing lists, and you want the articles you have read to disappear after a while:
(setq gnus-auto-expirable-newsgroups
"mail.nonsense-list\\|mail.nice-list")
Another way to have auto-expiry happen is to have the element
auto-expire in the group parameters of the group.
If you use adaptive scoring (see Adaptive Scoring) and auto-expiring, you'll have problems. Auto-expiring and adaptive scoring don't really mix very well.
The nnmail-expiry-wait variable supplies the default time an
expirable article has to live. Gnus starts counting days from when the
message arrived, not from when it was sent. The default is seven
days.
Gnus also supplies a function that lets you fine-tune how long articles are to live, based on what group they are in. Let's say you want to have one month expiry period in the `mail.private' group, a one day expiry period in the `mail.junk' group, and a six day expiry period everywhere else:
(setq nnmail-expiry-wait-function
(lambda (group)
(cond ((string= group "mail.private")
31)
((string= group "mail.junk")
1)
((string= group "important")
'never)
(t
6))))
The group names this function is fed are “unadorned” group names—no `nnml:' prefixes and the like.
The nnmail-expiry-wait variable and
nnmail-expiry-wait-function function can either be a number (not
necessarily an integer) or one of the symbols immediate or
never.
You can also use the expiry-wait group parameter to selectively
change the expiry period (see Group Parameters).
The normal action taken when expiring articles is to delete them.
However, in some circumstances it might make more sense to move them
to other groups instead of deleting them. The variable
nnmail-expiry-target (and the expiry-target group
parameter) controls this. The variable supplies a default value for
all groups, which can be overridden for specific groups by the group
parameter. default value is delete, but this can also be a
string (which should be the name of the group the message should be
moved to), or a function (which will be called in a buffer narrowed to
the message in question, and with the name of the group being moved
from as its parameter) which should return a target—either a group
name or delete.
Here's an example for specifying a group name:
(setq nnmail-expiry-target "nnml:expired")
Gnus provides a function nnmail-fancy-expiry-target which will
expire mail to groups according to the variable
nnmail-fancy-expiry-targets. Here's an example:
(setq nnmail-expiry-target 'nnmail-fancy-expiry-target
nnmail-fancy-expiry-targets
'((to-from "boss" "nnfolder:Work")
("subject" "IMPORTANT" "nnfolder:IMPORTANT.%Y.%b")
("from" ".*" "nnfolder:Archive-%Y")))
With this setup, any mail that has IMPORTANT in its Subject
header and was sent in the year YYYY and month MMM, will
get expired to the group nnfolder:IMPORTANT.YYYY.MMM. If its
From or To header contains the string boss, it will get expired
to nnfolder:Work. All other mail will get expired to
nnfolder:Archive-YYYY.
If nnmail-keep-last-article is non-nil, Gnus will never
expire the final article in a mail newsgroup. This is to make life
easier for procmail users.
By the way: That line up there, about Gnus never expiring non-expirable
articles, is a lie. If you put total-expire in the group
parameters, articles will not be marked as expirable, but all read
articles will be put through the expiry process. Use with extreme
caution. Even more dangerous is the
gnus-total-expirable-newsgroups variable. All groups that match
this regexp will have all read articles put through the expiry process,
which means that all old mail articles in the groups in question
will be deleted after a while. Use with extreme caution, and don't come
crying to me when you discover that the regexp you used matched the
wrong group and all your important mail has disappeared. Be a
man! Or a woman! Whatever you feel more comfortable
with! So there!
Most people make most of their mail groups total-expirable, though.
If gnus-inhibit-user-auto-expire is non-nil, user marking
commands will not mark an article as expirable, even if the group has
auto-expire turned on.
Mailers and list servers are notorious for doing all sorts of really,
really stupid things with mail. “Hey, RFC 822 doesn't explicitly
prohibit us from adding the string wE aRe ElItE!!!!!1!! to the
end of all lines passing through our server, so let's do that!!!!1!”
Yes, but RFC 822 wasn't designed to be read by morons. Things that were
considered to be self-evident were not discussed. So. Here we are.
Case in point: The German version of Microsoft Exchange adds `AW: ' to the subjects of replies instead of `Re: '. I could pretend to be shocked and dismayed by this, but I haven't got the energy. It is to laugh.
Gnus provides a plethora of functions for washing articles while displaying them, but it might be nicer to do the filtering before storing the mail to disk. For that purpose, we have three hooks and various functions that can be put in these hooks.
nnmail-prepare-incoming-hooknnheader-ms-strip-crnnmail-prepare-incoming-header-hooknnmail-remove-leading-whitespace(Note that this function works on both the header on the body of all
messages, so it is a potentially dangerous function to use (if a body
of a message contains something that looks like a header line). So
rather than fix the bug, it is of course the right solution to make it
into a feature by documenting it.)
nnmail-remove-list-identifiersSubject headers. I'm sure that's nice for
people who use stone age mail readers. This function will remove
strings that match the nnmail-list-identifiers regexp, which can
also be a list of regexp. nnmail-list-identifiers may not contain
\\(..\\).
For instance, if you want to remove the `(idm)' and the `nagnagnag' identifiers:
(setq nnmail-list-identifiers
'("(idm)" "nagnagnag"))
This can also be done non-destructively with
gnus-list-identifiers, See Article Hiding.
nnmail-remove-tabsnnmail-fix-eudora-headersReferences headers, but OK
In-Reply-To headers. This function will get rid of the
References headers.
nnmail-prepare-incoming-message-hookIf you are a member of a couple of mailing lists, you will sometimes
receive two copies of the same mail. This can be quite annoying, so
nnmail checks for and treats any duplicates it might find. To do
this, it keeps a cache of old Message-IDs—
nnmail-message-id-cache-file, which is ~/.nnmail-cache by
default. The approximate maximum number of Message-IDs stored
there is controlled by the nnmail-message-id-cache-length
variable, which is 1000 by default. (So 1000 Message-IDs will be
stored.) If all this sounds scary to you, you can set
nnmail-treat-duplicates to warn (which is what it is by
default), and nnmail won't delete duplicate mails. Instead it
will insert a warning into the head of the mail saying that it thinks
that this is a duplicate of a different message.
This variable can also be a function. If that's the case, the function
will be called from a buffer narrowed to the message in question with
the Message-ID as a parameter. The function must return either
nil, warn, or delete.
You can turn this feature off completely by setting the variable to
nil.
If you want all the duplicate mails to be put into a special duplicates group, you could do that using the normal mail split methods:
(setq nnmail-split-fancy
'(| ;; Messages duplicates go to a separate group.
("gnus-warning" "duplicat\\(e\\|ion\\) of message" "duplicate")
;; Message from daemons, postmaster, and the like to another.
(any mail "mail.misc")
;; Other rules.
[...] ))
Or something like:
(setq nnmail-split-methods
'(("duplicates" "^Gnus-Warning:.*duplicate")
;; Other rules.
[...]))
Here's a neat feature: If you know that the recipient reads her mail
with Gnus, and that she has nnmail-treat-duplicates set to
delete, you can send her as many insults as you like, just by
using a Message-ID of a mail that you know that she's already
received. Think of all the fun! She'll never see any of it! Whee!
If you start using any of the mail back ends, they have the annoying habit of assuming that you want to read mail with them. This might not be unreasonable, but it might not be what you want.
If you set mail-sources and nnmail-spool-file to
nil, none of the back ends will ever attempt to read incoming
mail, which should help.
This might be too much, if, for instance, you are reading mail quite
happily with nnml and just want to peek at some old Rmail
file you have stashed away with nnbabyl. All back ends have
variables called back-end-get-new-mail. If you want to disable
the nnbabyl mail reading, you edit the virtual server for the
group to have a setting where nnbabyl-get-new-mail to nil.
All the mail back ends will call nn*-prepare-save-mail-hook
narrowed to the article to be saved before saving it when reading
incoming mail.
Gnus will read the mail spool when you activate a mail group. The mail file is first copied to your home directory. What happens after that depends on what format you want to store your mail in.
There are six different mail back ends in the standard Gnus, and more
back ends are available separately. The mail back end most people use
(because it is possibly the fastest) is nnml (see Mail Spool).
The nnmbox back end will use the standard Un*x mbox file to store
mail. nnmbox will add extra headers to each mail article to say
which group it belongs in.
Virtual server settings:
nnmbox-mbox-filennmbox-active-filennmbox-get-new-mailnil, nnmbox will read incoming mail and split it
into groups. Default is t.
The nnbabyl back end will use a Babyl mail box (aka. Rmail
mbox) to store mail. nnbabyl will add extra headers to each
mail article to say which group it belongs in.
Virtual server settings:
nnbabyl-mbox-filennbabyl-active-filennbabyl-get-new-mailnil, nnbabyl will read incoming mail. Default is
t
The nnml spool mail format isn't compatible with any other known format. It should be used with some caution.
If you use this back end, Gnus will split all incoming mail into files,
one file for each mail, and put the articles into the corresponding
directories under the directory specified by the nnml-directory
variable. The default value is ~/Mail/.
You do not have to create any directories beforehand; Gnus will take care of all that.
If you have a strict limit as to how many files you are allowed to store in your account, you should not use this back end. As each mail gets its own file, you might very well occupy thousands of inodes within a few weeks. If this is no problem for you, and it isn't a problem for you having your friendly systems administrator walking around, madly, shouting “Who is eating all my inodes?! Who? Who!?!”, then you should know that this is probably the fastest format to use. You do not have to trudge through a big mbox file just to read your new mail.
nnml is probably the slowest back end when it comes to article
splitting. It has to create lots of files, and it also generates
NOV databases for the incoming mails. This makes it possibly the
fastest back end when it comes to reading mail.
When the marks file is used (which it is by default), nnml
servers have the property that you may backup them using tar or
similar, and later be able to restore them into Gnus (by adding the
proper nnml server) and have all your marks be preserved. Marks
for a group is usually stored in the .marks file (but see
nnml-marks-file-name) within each nnml group's directory.
Individual nnml groups are also possible to backup, use G m
to restore the group (after restoring the backup into the nnml
directory).
If for some reason you believe your .marks files are screwed up, you can just delete them all. Gnus will then correctly regenerate them next time it starts.
Virtual server settings:
nnml-directorynnml directories will be placed under this directory. The
default is the value of message-directory (whose default value
is ~/Mail).
nnml-active-filennml server. The default is
~/Mail/active.
nnml-newsgroups-filennml group descriptions file. See Newsgroups File Format. The default is ~/Mail/newsgroups.
nnml-get-new-mailnil, nnml will read incoming mail. The default is
t.
nnml-nov-is-evilnil, this back end will ignore any NOV files. The
default is nil.
nnml-nov-file-namennml-prepare-save-mail-hooknnml-marks-is-evilnil, this back end will ignore any marks files. The
default is nil.
nnml-marks-file-namennml-use-compressed-filesnil, nnml will allow using compressed message
files.
If your nnml groups and NOV files get totally out of
whack, you can do a complete update by typing M-x
nnml-generate-nov-databases. This command will trawl through the
entire nnml hierarchy, looking at each and every article, so it
might take a while to complete. A better interface to this
functionality can be found in the server buffer (see Server Commands).
nnmh is just like nnml, except that is doesn't generate
NOV databases and it doesn't keep an active file or marks
file. This makes nnmh a much slower back end than
nnml, but it also makes it easier to write procmail scripts
for.
Virtual server settings:
nnmh-directorynnmh directories will be located under this directory. The
default is the value of message-directory (whose default is
~/Mail)
nnmh-get-new-mailnil, nnmh will read incoming mail. The default is
t.
nnmh-be-safenil, nnmh will go to ridiculous lengths to make
sure that the articles in the folder are actually what Gnus thinks
they are. It will check date stamps and stat everything in sight, so
setting this to t will mean a serious slow-down. If you never
use anything but Gnus to read the nnmh articles, you do not
have to set this variable to t. The default is nil.
nnmaildir stores mail in the maildir format, with each maildir
corresponding to a group in Gnus. This format is documented here:
http://cr.yp.to/proto/maildir.html and here:
http://www.qmail.org/man/man5/maildir.html. nnmaildir
also stores extra information in the .nnmaildir/ directory
within a maildir.
Maildir format was designed to allow concurrent deliveries and
reading, without needing locks. With other back ends, you would have
your mail delivered to a spool of some kind, and then you would
configure Gnus to split mail from that spool into your groups. You
can still do that with nnmaildir, but the more common
configuration is to have your mail delivered directly to the maildirs
that appear as group in Gnus.
nnmaildir is designed to be perfectly reliable: C-g will
never corrupt its data in memory, and SIGKILL will never
corrupt its data in the filesystem.
nnmaildir stores article marks and NOV data in each
maildir. So you can copy a whole maildir from one Gnus setup to
another, and you will keep your marks.
Virtual server settings:
directorynnmaildir servers (it's very unlikely that
you'd need more than one), you need to create a directory and populate
it with maildirs or symlinks to maildirs (and nothing else; do not
choose a directory already used for other purposes). Each maildir
will be represented in Gnus as a newsgroup on that server; the
filename of the symlink will be the name of the group. Any filenames
in the directory starting with `.' are ignored. The directory is
scanned when you first start Gnus, and each time you type g in
the group buffer; if any maildirs have been removed or added,
nnmaildir notices at these times.
The value of the directory parameter should be a Lisp form
which is processed by eval and expand-file-name to get
the path of the directory for this server. The form is evaled
only when the server is opened; the resulting string is used until the
server is closed. (If you don't know about forms and eval,
don't worry—a simple string will work.) This parameter is not
optional; you must specify it. I don't recommend using
"~/Mail" or a subdirectory of it; several other parts of Gnus
use that directory by default for various things, and may get confused
if nnmaildir uses it too. "~/.nnmaildir" is a typical
value.
target-prefixeval and
expand-file-name. The form is evaled only when the
server is opened; the resulting string is used until the server is
closed.
When you create a group on an nnmaildir server, the maildir is
created with target-prefix prepended to its name, and a symlink
pointing to that maildir is created, named with the plain group name.
So if directory is "~/.nnmaildir" and
target-prefix is "../maildirs/", then when you create
the group foo, nnmaildir will create
~/.nnmaildir/../maildirs/foo as a maildir, and will create
~/.nnmaildir/foo as a symlink pointing to
../maildirs/foo.
You can set target-prefix to a string without any slashes to
create both maildirs and symlinks in the same directory; in
this case, any maildirs found in directory whose names start
with target-prefix will not be listed as groups (but the
symlinks pointing to them will be).
As a special case, if target-prefix is "" (the default),
then when you create a group, the maildir will be created in
directory without a corresponding symlink. Beware that you
cannot use gnus-group-delete-group on such groups without the
force argument.
directory-filesdirectory-files (such as directory-files itself). It is
used to scan the server's directory for maildirs. This
parameter is optional; the default is
nnheader-directory-files-safe if
nnheader-directory-files-is-safe is nil, and
directory-files otherwise.
(nnheader-directory-files-is-safe is checked only once when the
server is opened; if you want to check it each time the directory is
scanned, you'll have to provide your own function that does that.)
get-new-mailnil, then after scanning for new mail in the group
maildirs themselves as usual, this server will also incorporate mail
the conventional Gnus way, from mail-sources according to
nnmail-split-methods or nnmail-split-fancy. The default
value is nil.
Do not use the same maildir both in mail-sources and as
an nnmaildir group. The results might happen to be useful, but
that would be by chance, not by design, and the results might be
different in the future. If your split rules create new groups,
remember to supply a create-directory server parameter.
nnmaildir uses several group parameters. It's safe to ignore
all this; the default behavior for nnmaildir is the same as the
default behavior for other mail back ends: articles are deleted after
one week, etc. Except for the expiry parameters, all this
functionality is unique to nnmaildir, so you can ignore it if
you're just trying to duplicate the behavior you already have with
another back end.
If the value of any of these parameters is a vector, the first element
is evaluated as a Lisp form and the result is used, rather than the
original value. If the value is not a vector, the value itself is
evaluated as a Lisp form. (This is why these parameters use names
different from those of other, similar parameters supported by other
back ends: they have different, though similar, meanings.) (For
numbers, strings, nil, and t, you can ignore the
eval business again; for other values, remember to use an extra
quote and wrap the value in a vector when appropriate.)
expire-agenever to specify that
articles should never be expired. If this parameter is not set,
nnmaildir falls back to the usual
nnmail-expiry-wait(-function) variables (the
expiry-wait group parameter overrides nnmail-expiry-wait
and makes nnmail-expiry-wait-function ineffective). If you
wanted a value of 3 days, you could use something like [(* 3 24
60 60)]; nnmaildir will evaluate the form and use the result.
An article's age is measured starting from the article file's
modification time. Normally, this is the same as the article's
delivery time, but editing an article makes it younger. Moving an
article (other than via expiry) may also make an article younger.
expire-group "backend+server.address.string:group.name"
and if it is not the name of the same group that the parameter belongs
to, then articles will be moved to the specified group during expiry
before being deleted. If this is set to an nnmaildir
group, the article will be just as old in the destination group as it
was in the source group. So be careful with expire-age in the
destination group. If this is set to the name of the same group that
the parameter belongs to, then the article is not expired at all. If
you use the vector form, the first element is evaluated once for each
article. So that form can refer to
nnmaildir-article-file-name, etc., to decide where to put the
article. Even if this parameter is not set, nnmaildir
does not fall back to the expiry-target group parameter or the
nnmail-expiry-target variable.
read-onlyt, nnmaildir will treat the articles
in this maildir as read-only. This means: articles are not renamed
from new/ into cur/; articles are only found in
new/, not cur/; articles are never deleted; articles
cannot be edited. new/ is expected to be a symlink to the
new/ directory of another maildir—e.g., a system-wide mailbox
containing a mailing list of common interest. Everything in the
maildir outside new/ is not treated as read-only, so for
a shared mailbox, you do still need to set up your own maildir (or
have write permission to the shared mailbox); your maildir just won't
contain extra copies of the articles.
directory-filesdirectory-files. It is
used to scan the directories in the maildir corresponding to this
group to find articles. The default is the function specified by the
server's directory-files parameter.
distrust-Lines:nil, nnmaildir will always count the lines of an
article, rather than use the Lines: header field. If
nil, the header field will be used if present.
always-marks['(read expire)]. Whenever
Gnus asks nnmaildir for article marks, nnmaildir will
say that all articles have these marks, regardless of whether the
marks stored in the filesystem say so. This is a proof-of-concept
feature that will probably be removed eventually; it ought to be done
in Gnus proper, or abandoned if it's not worthwhile.
never-marks['(tick expire)]. Whenever
Gnus asks nnmaildir for article marks, nnmaildir will
say that no articles have these marks, regardless of whether the marks
stored in the filesystem say so. never-marks overrides
always-marks. This is a proof-of-concept feature that will
probably be removed eventually; it ought to be done in Gnus proper, or
abandoned if it's not worthwhile.
nov-cache-sizennmaildir keeps NOV data in memory
for a limited number of articles in each group. (This is probably not
worthwhile, and will probably be removed in the future.) This
parameter's value is noticed only the first time a group is seen after
the server is opened—i.e., when you first start Gnus, typically.
The NOV cache is never resized until the server is closed
and reopened. The default is an estimate of the number of articles
that would be displayed in the summary buffer: a count of articles
that are either marked with tick or not marked with
read, plus a little extra.
Articles are stored in the cur/ subdirectory of each maildir.
Each article file is named like uniq:info, where uniq
contains no colons. nnmaildir ignores, but preserves, the
:info part. (Other maildir readers typically use this part of
the filename to store marks.) The uniq part uniquely
identifies the article, and is used in various places in the
.nnmaildir/ subdirectory of the maildir to store information
about the corresponding article. The full pathname of an article is
available in the variable nnmaildir-article-file-name after you
request the article in the summary buffer.
An article identified by uniq has its NOV data (used
to generate lines in the summary buffer) stored in
.nnmaildir/nov/uniq. There is no
nnmaildir-generate-nov-databases function. (There isn't much
need for it—an article's NOV data is updated automatically
when the article or nnmail-extra-headers has changed.) You can
force nnmaildir to regenerate the NOV data for a
single article simply by deleting the corresponding NOV
file, but beware: this will also cause nnmaildir to
assign a new article number for this article, which may cause trouble
with seen marks, the Agent, and the cache.
An article identified by uniq is considered to have the mark
flag when the file .nnmaildir/marks/flag/uniq exists.
When Gnus asks nnmaildir for a group's marks, nnmaildir
looks for such files and reports the set of marks it finds. When Gnus
asks nnmaildir to store a new set of marks, nnmaildir
creates and deletes the corresponding files as needed. (Actually,
rather than create a new file for each mark, it just creates hard
links to .nnmaildir/markfile, to save inodes.)
You can invent new marks by creating a new directory in
.nnmaildir/marks/. You can tar up a maildir and remove it from
your server, untar it later, and keep your marks. You can add and
remove marks yourself by creating and deleting mark files. If you do
this while Gnus is running and your nnmaildir server is open,
it's best to exit all summary buffers for nnmaildir groups and
type s in the group buffer first, and to type g or
M-g in the group buffer afterwards. Otherwise, Gnus might not
pick up the changes, and might undo them.
nnfolder is a back end for storing each mail group in a
separate file. Each file is in the standard Un*x mbox format.
nnfolder will add extra headers to keep track of article
numbers and arrival dates.
When the marks file is used (which it is by default), nnfolder
servers have the property that you may backup them using tar or
similar, and later be able to restore them into Gnus (by adding the
proper nnfolder server) and have all your marks be preserved.
Marks for a group are usually stored in a file named as the mbox file
with .mrk concatenated to it (but see
nnfolder-marks-file-suffix) within the nnfolder
directory. Individual nnfolder groups are also possible to
backup, use G m to restore the group (after restoring the backup
into the nnfolder directory).
Virtual server settings:
nnfolder-directorynnfolder mail boxes will be stored under this
directory. The default is the value of message-directory
(whose default is ~/Mail)
nnfolder-active-filennfolder-newsgroups-filennfolder-get-new-mailnil, nnfolder will read incoming mail. The
default is t
nnfolder-save-buffer-hooknnfolder buffers. If
you wish to switch this off, you could say something like the
following in your .emacs file:
(defun turn-off-backup ()
(set (make-local-variable 'backup-inhibited) t))
(add-hook 'nnfolder-save-buffer-hook 'turn-off-backup)
nnfolder-delete-mail-hooknnfolder-nov-is-evilnil, this back end will ignore any NOV files. The
default is nil.
nnfolder-nov-file-suffixnnfolder-nov-directorynil, nnfolder-directory is used.
nnfolder-marks-is-evilnil, this back end will ignore any marks files. The
default is nil.
nnfolder-marks-file-suffixnnfolder-marks-directorynil, nnfolder-directory is used.
If you have lots of nnfolder-like files you'd like to read with
nnfolder, you can use the M-x nnfolder-generate-active-file
command to make nnfolder aware of all likely files in
nnfolder-directory. This only works if you use long file names,
though.
First, just for terminology, the back end is the common word for a low-level access method—a transport, if you will, by which something is acquired. The sense is that one's mail has to come from somewhere, and so selection of a suitable back end is required in order to get that mail within spitting distance of Gnus.
The same concept exists for Usenet itself: Though access to articles is
typically done by NNTP these days, once upon a midnight dreary, everyone
in the world got at Usenet by running a reader on the machine where the
articles lay (the machine which today we call an NNTP server), and
access was by the reader stepping into the articles' directory spool
area directly. One can still select between either the nntp or
nnspool back ends, to select between these methods, if one happens
actually to live on the server (or can see its spool directly, anyway,
via NFS).
The goal in selecting a mail back end is to pick one which simultaneously represents a suitable way of dealing with the original format plus leaving mail in a form that is convenient to use in the future. Here are some high and low points on each:
nnmboxnnbabylBoth of the above forms leave your mail in a single file on your
file system, and they must parse that entire file each time you take a
look at your mail.
nnmlnnml is the back end which smells the most as though you were
actually operating with an nnspool-accessed Usenet system. (In
fact, I believe nnml actually derived from nnspool code,
lo these years ago.) One's mail is taken from the original spool file,
and is then cut up into individual message files, 1:1. It maintains a
Usenet-style active file (analogous to what one finds in an INN- or
CNews-based news system in (for instance) /var/lib/news/active,
or what is returned via the `NNTP LIST' verb) and also creates
overview files for efficient group entry, as has been defined for
NNTP servers for some years now. It is slower in mail-splitting,
due to the creation of lots of files, updates to the nnml active
file, and additions to overview files on a per-message basis, but it is
extremely fast on access because of what amounts to the indexing support
provided by the active file and overviews.
nnml costs inodes in a big way; that is, it soaks up the
resource which defines available places in the file system to put new
files. Sysadmins take a dim view of heavy inode occupation within
tight, shared file systems. But if you live on a personal machine where
the file system is your own and space is not at a premium, nnml
wins big.
It is also problematic using this back end if you are living in a
FAT16-based Windows world, since much space will be wasted on all these
tiny files.
nnmhnnmh
is considered to be semantically equivalent to “nnml without
active file or overviews”. This is arguably the worst choice, because
one gets the slowness of individual file creation married to the
slowness of access parsing when learning what's new in one's groups.
nnfoldernnfolder is nnmbox (the first
method described above) on a per-group basis. That is, nnmbox
itself puts all one's mail in one file; nnfolder provides a
little bit of optimization to this so that each of one's mail groups has
a Unix mail box file. It's faster than nnmbox because each group
can be parsed separately, and still provides the simple Unix mail box
format requiring minimal effort in moving the mail around. In addition,
it maintains an “active” file making it much faster for Gnus to figure
out how many messages there are in each separate group.
If you have groups that are expected to have a massive amount of
messages, nnfolder is not the best choice, but if you receive
only a moderate amount of mail, nnfolder is probably the most
friendly mail back end all over.
nnmaildirnnmaildir uses
incompatible group parameters, slightly different from those of other
mail back ends.
nnmaildir is largely similar to nnml, with some notable
differences. Each message is stored in a separate file, but the
filename is unrelated to the article number in Gnus. nnmaildir
also stores the equivalent of nnml's overview files in one file
per article, so it uses about twice as many inodes as nnml. (Use
df -i to see how plentiful your inode supply is.) If this slows
you down or takes up very much space, consider switching to
ReiserFS or another non-block-structured
file system.
Since maildirs don't require locking for delivery, the maildirs you use
as groups can also be the maildirs your mail is directly delivered to.
This means you can skip Gnus' mail splitting if your mail is already
organized into different mailboxes during delivery. A directory
entry in mail-sources would have a similar effect, but would
require one set of mailboxes for spooling deliveries (in mbox format,
thus damaging message bodies), and another set to be used as groups (in
whatever format you like). A maildir has a built-in spool, in the
new/ subdirectory. Beware that currently, mail moved from
new/ to cur/ instead of via mail splitting will not
undergo treatment such as duplicate checking.
nnmaildir stores article marks for a given group in the
corresponding maildir, in a way designed so that it's easy to manipulate
them from outside Gnus. You can tar up a maildir, unpack it somewhere
else, and still have your marks. nnml also stores marks, but
it's not as easy to work with them from outside Gnus as with
nnmaildir.
nnmaildir uses a significant amount of memory to speed things up.
(It keeps in memory some of the things that nnml stores in files
and that nnmh repeatedly parses out of message files.) If this
is a problem for you, you can set the nov-cache-size group
parameter to something small (0 would probably not work, but 1 probably
would) to make it use less memory. This caching will probably be
removed in the future.
Startup is likely to be slower with nnmaildir than with other
back ends. Everything else is likely to be faster, depending in part
on your file system.
nnmaildir does not use nnoo, so you cannot use nnoo
to write an nnmaildir-derived back end.
Web-based discussion forums are getting more and more popular. On many subjects, the web-based forums have become the most important forums, eclipsing the importance of mailing lists and news groups. The reason is easy to understand—they are friendly to new users; you just point and click, and there's the discussion. With mailing lists, you have to go through a cumbersome subscription procedure, and most people don't even know what a news group is.
The problem with this scenario is that web browsers are not very good at being newsreaders. They do not keep track of what articles you've read; they do not allow you to score on subjects you're interested in; they do not allow off-line browsing; they require you to click around and drive you mad in the end.
So—if web browsers suck at reading discussion forums, why not use Gnus to do it instead?
Gnus has been getting a bit of a collection of back ends for providing interfaces to these sources.
All the web sources require Emacs/W3 and the url library or those alternatives to work.
The main caveat with all these web sources is that they probably won't work for a very long time. Gleaning information from the HTML data is guesswork at best, and when the layout is altered, the Gnus back end will fail. If you have reasonably new versions of these back ends, though, you should be ok.
One thing all these Web methods have in common is that the Web sources are often down, unavailable or just plain too slow to be fun. In those cases, it makes a lot of sense to let the Gnus Agent (see Gnus Unplugged) handle downloading articles, and then you can read them at leisure from your local disk. No more World Wide Wait for you.
Some of the back ends, notably nnml, nnfolder, and
nnmaildir, now actually store the article marks with each group.
For these servers, archiving and restoring a group while preserving
marks is fairly simple.
(Preserving the group level and group parameters as well still requires ritual dancing and sacrifices to the .newsrc.eld deity though.)
To archive an entire nnml, nnfolder, or nnmaildir
server, take a recursive copy of the server directory. There is no need
to shut down Gnus, so archiving may be invoked by cron or
similar. You restore the data by restoring the directory tree, and
adding a server definition pointing to that directory in Gnus. The
Article Backlog, Asynchronous Fetching and other things
might interfere with overwriting data, so you may want to shut down Gnus
before you restore the data.
It is also possible to archive individual nnml,
nnfolder, or nnmaildir groups, while preserving marks.
For nnml or nnmaildir, you copy all files in the group's
directory. For nnfolder you need to copy both the base folder
file itself (FOO, say), and the marks file (FOO.mrk in
this example). Restoring the group is done with G m from the Group
buffer. The last step makes Gnus notice the new directory.
nnmaildir notices the new directory automatically, so G m
is unnecessary in that case.
It's, like, too neat to search the Usenet for articles that match a string, but it, like, totally sucks, like, totally, to use one of those, like, Web browsers, and you, like, have to, rilly, like, look at the commercials, so, like, with Gnus you can do rad, rilly, searches without having to use a browser.
The nnweb back end allows an easy interface to the mighty search
engine. You create an nnweb group, enter a search pattern, and
then enter the group and read the articles like you would any normal
group. The G w command in the group buffer (see Foreign Groups) will do this in an easy-to-use fashion.
nnweb groups don't really lend themselves to being solid
groups—they have a very fleeting idea of article numbers. In fact,
each time you enter an nnweb group (not even changing the search
pattern), you are likely to get the articles ordered in a different
manner. Not even using duplicate suppression (see Duplicate Suppression) will help, since nnweb doesn't even know the
Message-ID of the articles before reading them using some search
engines (Google, for instance). The only possible way to keep track
of which articles you've read is by scoring on the Date
header—mark all articles posted before the last date you read the
group as read.
If the search engine changes its output substantially, nnweb
won't be able to parse it and will fail. One could hardly fault the Web
providers if they were to do this—their raison d'être is to
make money off of advertisements, not to provide services to the
community. Since nnweb washes the ads off all the articles, one
might think that the providers might be somewhat miffed. We'll see.
You must have the url and W3 package or those alternatives
(try customize-group on the `mm-url' variable group)
installed to be able to use nnweb.
Virtual server variables:
nnweb-typegoogle, dejanews, and gmane. Note that
dejanews is an alias to google.
nnweb-searchnnweb-max-hitsnnweb-type-definitionnnweb should do
with the various search engine types. The following elements must be
present:
articlemapsearchaddressidMessage-ID.
Slashdot is a popular news site, with
lively discussion following the news articles. nnslashdot will
let you read this forum in a convenient manner.
The easiest way to read this source is to put something like the following in your ~/.gnus.el file:
(setq gnus-secondary-select-methods
'((nnslashdot "")))
This will make Gnus query the nnslashdot back end for new comments
and groups. The F command will subscribe each new news article as
a new Gnus group, and you can read the comments by entering these
groups. (Note that the default subscription method is to subscribe new
groups as zombies. Other methods are available (see Subscription Methods).
If you want to remove an old nnslashdot group, the G DEL
command is the most handy tool (see Foreign Groups).
When following up to nnslashdot comments (or posting new
comments), some light HTMLizations will be performed. In
particular, text quoted with `> ' will be quoted with
`blockquote' instead, and signatures will have `br' added to
the end of each line. Other than that, you can just write HTML
directly into the message buffer. Note that Slashdot filters out some
HTML forms.
The following variables can be altered to change its behavior:
nnslashdot-threadednnslashdot should display threaded groups or not. The
default is t. To be able to display threads, nnslashdot
has to retrieve absolutely all comments in a group upon entry. If a
threaded display is not required, nnslashdot will only retrieve
the comments that are actually wanted by the user. Threading is nicer,
but much, much slower than unthreaded.
nnslashdot-login-namennslashdot-passwordnnslashdot-directorynnslashdot will store its files. The default is
~/News/slashdot/.
nnslashdot-active-urlnnslashdot-comments-urlnnslashdot-article-urlnnslashdot-thresholdnnslashdot-group-numberThe Ultimate Bulletin Board is probably the most popular Web bulletin board system used. It has a quite regular and nice interface, and it's possible to get the information Gnus needs to keep groups updated.
The easiest way to get started with nnultimate is to say
something like the following in the group buffer: B nnultimate RET
http://www.tcj.com/messboard/ubbcgi/ RET. (Substitute the URL
(not including `Ultimate.cgi' or the like at the end) for a forum
you're interested in; there's quite a list of them on the Ultimate web
site.) Then subscribe to the groups you're interested in from the
server buffer, and read them from the group buffer.
The following nnultimate variables can be altered:
nnultimate-directorynnultimate stores its files. The default isSome mailing lists only have archives on Web servers, such as http://www.egroups.com/ and http://www.mail-archive.com/. It has a quite regular and nice interface, and it's possible to get the information Gnus needs to keep groups updated.
The easiest way to get started with nnwarchive is to say
something like the following in the group buffer: M-x
gnus-group-make-warchive-group RET an_egroup RET egroups RET
www.egroups.com RET your@email.address RET. (Substitute the
an_egroup with the mailing list you subscribed, the
your@email.address with your email address.), or to browse the
back end by B nnwarchive RET mail-archive RET.
The following nnwarchive variables can be altered:
nnwarchive-directorynnwarchive stores its files. The default isnnwarchive-loginnnwarchive-passwdSome web sites have an RDF Site Summary (RSS). RSS is a format for summarizing headlines from news related sites (such as BBC or CNN). But basically anything list-like can be presented as an RSS feed: weblogs, changelogs or recent changes to a wiki (e.g. http://cliki.net/recent-changes.rdf).
RSS has a quite regular and nice interface, and it's possible to get the information Gnus needs to keep groups updated.
Note: you had better use Emacs which supports the utf-8 coding
system because RSS uses UTF-8 for encoding non-ASCII
text by default. It is also used by default for non-ASCII
group names.
Use G R from the group buffer to subscribe to a feed—you will be prompted for the location, the title and the description of the feed. The title, which allows any characters, will be used for the group name and the name of the group data file. The description can be omitted.
An easy way to get started with nnrss is to say something like
the following in the group buffer: B nnrss RET RET y, then
subscribe to groups.
The nnrss back end saves the group data file in
nnrss-directory (see below) for each nnrss group. File
names containing non-ASCII characters will be encoded by the
coding system specified with the nnmail-pathname-coding-system
variable. If it is nil, in Emacs the coding system defaults to
the value of default-file-name-coding-system. If you are using
XEmacs and want to use non-ASCII group names, you should set
the value for the nnmail-pathname-coding-system variable properly.
The nnrss back end generates `multipart/alternative'
MIME articles in which each contains a `text/plain' part
and a `text/html' part.
You can also use the following commands to import and export your subscriptions from a file in OPML format (Outline Processor Markup Language).
The following nnrss variables can be altered:
nnrss-directorynnrss stores its files. The default is
~/News/rss/.
nnrss-file-coding-systemnnrss groups
data files. The default is the value of
mm-universal-coding-system (which defaults to emacs-mule
in Emacs or escape-quoted in XEmacs).
nnrss-use-localnnrss-use-local to t, nnrss will read
the feeds from local files in nnrss-directory. You can use
the command nnrss-generate-download-script to generate a
download script using wget.
nnrss-wash-html-in-text-plain-partsnil means that nnrss renders text in `text/plain'
parts as HTML. The function specified by the
mm-text-html-renderer variable (see Display Customization) will be used
to render text. If it is nil, which is the default, text will
simply be folded. Leave it nil if you prefer to see
`text/html' parts.
The following code may be helpful, if you want to show the description in the summary buffer.
(add-to-list 'nnmail-extra-headers nnrss-description-field)
(setq gnus-summary-line-format "%U%R%z%I%(%[%4L: %-15,15f%]%) %s%uX\n")
(defun gnus-user-format-function-X (header)
(let ((descr
(assq nnrss-description-field (mail-header-extra header))))
(if descr (concat "\n\t" (cdr descr)) "")))
The following code may be useful to open an nnrss url directly from the summary buffer.
(require 'browse-url)
(defun browse-nnrss-url( arg )
(interactive "p")
(let ((url (assq nnrss-url-field
(mail-header-extra
(gnus-data-header
(assq (gnus-summary-article-number)
gnus-newsgroup-data))))))
(if url
(progn
(browse-url (cdr url))
(gnus-summary-mark-as-read-forward 1))
(gnus-summary-scroll-up arg))))
(eval-after-load "gnus"
#'(define-key gnus-summary-mode-map
(kbd "<RET>") 'browse-nnrss-url))
(add-to-list 'nnmail-extra-headers nnrss-url-field)
Even if you have added "text/html" to the
mm-discouraged-alternatives variable (see Display Customization) since you don't want to see HTML parts, it might be
more useful especially in nnrss groups to display
`text/html' parts. Here's an example of setting
mm-discouraged-alternatives as a group parameter (see Group Parameters) in order to display `text/html' parts only in
nnrss groups:
;; Set the default value ofmm-discouraged-alternatives. (eval-after-load "gnus-sum" '(add-to-list 'gnus-newsgroup-variables '(mm-discouraged-alternatives . '("text/html" "image/.*")))) ;; Display `text/html' parts innnrssgroups. (add-to-list 'gnus-parameters '("\\`nnrss:" (mm-discouraged-alternatives nil)))
Gnus uses the url library to fetch web pages and Emacs/W3 (or those alternatives) to display web pages. Emacs/W3 is documented in its own manual, but there are some things that may be more relevant for Gnus users.
For instance, a common question is how to make Emacs/W3 follow links
using the browse-url functions (which will call some external web
browser like Netscape). Here's one way:
(eval-after-load "w3"
'(progn
(fset 'w3-fetch-orig (symbol-function 'w3-fetch))
(defun w3-fetch (&optional url target)
(interactive (list (w3-read-url-with-default)))
(if (eq major-mode 'gnus-article-mode)
(browse-url url)
(w3-fetch-orig url target)))))
Put that in your .emacs file, and hitting links in W3-rendered
HTML in the Gnus article buffers will use browse-url to
follow the link.
IMAP is a network protocol for reading mail (or news, or ...), think of it as a modernized NNTP. Connecting to a IMAP server is much similar to connecting to a news server, you just specify the network address of the server.
IMAP has two properties. First, IMAP can do everything that POP can, it can hence be viewed as a POP++. Secondly, IMAP is a mail storage protocol, similar to NNTP being a news storage protocol—however, IMAP offers more features than NNTP because news is more or less read-only whereas mail is read-write.
If you want to use IMAP as a POP++, use an imap
entry in mail-sources. With this, Gnus will fetch mails from
the IMAP server and store them on the local disk. This is
not the usage described in this section—See Mail Sources.
If you want to use IMAP as a mail storage protocol, use an nnimap
entry in gnus-secondary-select-methods. With this, Gnus will
manipulate mails stored on the IMAP server. This is the kind of
usage explained in this section.
A server configuration in ~/.gnus.el with a few IMAP servers might look something like the following. (Note that for TLS/SSL, you need external programs and libraries, see below.)
(setq gnus-secondary-select-methods
'((nnimap "simpleserver") ; no special configuration
; perhaps a ssh port forwarded server:
(nnimap "dolk"
(nnimap-address "localhost")
(nnimap-server-port 1430))
; a UW server running on localhost
(nnimap "barbar"
(nnimap-server-port 143)
(nnimap-address "localhost")
(nnimap-list-pattern ("INBOX" "mail/*")))
; anonymous public cyrus server:
(nnimap "cyrus.andrew.cmu.edu"
(nnimap-authenticator anonymous)
(nnimap-list-pattern "archive.*")
(nnimap-stream network))
; a ssl server on a non-standard port:
(nnimap "vic20"
(nnimap-address "vic20.somewhere.com")
(nnimap-server-port 9930)
(nnimap-stream ssl))))
After defining the new server, you can subscribe to groups on the server using normal Gnus commands such as U in the Group Buffer (see Subscription Commands) or via the Server Buffer (see Server Buffer).
The following variables can be used to create a virtual nnimap
server:
nnimap-addressnnimap-server-portNote that this should be an integer, example server specification:
(nnimap "mail.server.com"
(nnimap-server-port 4711))
nnimap-list-patternThe string can also be a cons of REFERENCE and the string as above, what REFERENCE is used for is server specific, but on the University of Washington server it's a directory that will be concatenated with the mailbox.
Example server specification:
(nnimap "mail.server.com"
(nnimap-list-pattern ("INBOX" "Mail/*" "alt.sex.*"
("~friend/Mail/" . "list/*"))))
nnimap-streamExample server specification:
(nnimap "mail.server.com"
(nnimap-stream ssl))
Please note that the value of nnimap-stream is a symbol!
The `imtest' program is shipped with Cyrus IMAPD. If you're
using `imtest' from Cyrus IMAPD < 2.0.14 (which includes version
1.5.x and 1.6.x) you need to frob imap-process-connection-type
to make imap.el use a pty instead of a pipe when communicating
with `imtest'. You will then suffer from a line length
restrictions on IMAP commands, which might make Gnus seem to hang
indefinitely if you have many articles in a mailbox. The variable
imap-kerberos4-program contain parameters to pass to the imtest
program.
For TLS connection, the gnutls-cli program from GNUTLS is
needed. It is available from
http://www.gnu.org/software/gnutls/.
This parameter specifies a list of command lines that invoke a GSSAPI
authenticated IMAP stream in a subshell. They are tried
sequentially until a connection is made, or the list has been
exhausted. By default, `gsasl' from GNU SASL, available from
http://www.gnu.org/software/gsasl/, and the `imtest'
program from Cyrus IMAPD (see imap-kerberos4-program), are
tried.
For SSL connections, the OpenSSL program is available from
http://www.openssl.org/. OpenSSL was formerly known as SSLeay,
and nnimap support it too—although the most recent versions of
SSLeay, 0.9.x, are known to have serious bugs making it
useless. Earlier versions, especially 0.8.x, of SSLeay are known to
work. The variable imap-ssl-program contain parameters to pass
to OpenSSL/SSLeay.
For IMAP connections using the shell stream, the variable
imap-shell-program specify what program to call.
nnimap-authenticatorExample server specification:
(nnimap "mail.server.com"
(nnimap-authenticator anonymous))
Please note that the value of nnimap-authenticator is a symbol!
gsasl or imtest.
imtest.
digest-md5.el.
nnimap-expunge-on-closeDeleted which doesn't actually
delete them, and this (marking them Deleted, that is) is what
nnimap does when you delete an article in Gnus (with B DEL or
similar).
Since the articles aren't really removed when we mark them with the
Deleted flag we'll need a way to actually delete them. Feel like
running in circles yet?
Traditionally, nnimap has removed all articles marked as Deleted
when closing a mailbox but this is now configurable by this server
variable.
The possible options are:
alwaysneverasknnimap-importantize-dormantnil (the default), marks dormant articles as ticked (as
well), for other IMAP clients. Within Gnus, dormant articles will
naturally still (only) be marked as dormant. This is to make dormant
articles stand out, just like ticked articles, in other IMAP
clients. (In other words, Gnus has two “Tick” marks and IMAP
has only one.)
Probably the only reason for frobbing this would be if you're trying enable per-user persistent dormant flags, using something like:
(setcdr (assq 'dormant nnimap-mark-to-flag-alist)
(format "gnus-dormant-%s" (user-login-name)))
(setcdr (assq 'dormant nnimap-mark-to-predicate-alist)
(format "KEYWORD gnus-dormant-%s" (user-login-name)))
In this case, you would not want the per-user dormant flag showing up
as ticked for other users.
nnimap-expunge-search-string"UID %s NOT SINCE %s", where the first %s is replaced by
UID set and the second %s is replaced by a date.
Probably the only useful value to change this to is
"UID %s NOT SENTSINCE %s", which makes nnimap use the Date: in
messages instead of the internal article date. See section 6.4.4 of
RFC 2060 for more information on valid strings.
However, if nnimap-search-uids-not-since-is-evil
is true, this variable has no effect since the search logic
is reversed, as described below.
nnimap-authinfo-fileftp ~/.netrc file. See the
variable nntp-authinfo-file for exact syntax; also see
NNTP. An example of an .authinfo line for an IMAP server, is:
machine students.uio.no login larsi password geheimnis port imap
Note that it should be port imap, or port 143, if you
use a nnimap-stream of tls or ssl, even if the
actual port number used is port 993 for secured IMAP. For
convenience, Gnus will accept port imaps as a synonym of
port imap.
nnimap-need-unselect-to-notice-new-mailnnimap-nov-is-evilgnus-agent.
Using a NOV database usually makes header fetching much
faster, but it uses the UID SEARCH UID command, which is very
slow on some servers (notably some versions of Courier). Since the Gnus
Agent caches the information in the NOV database without using
the slow command, this variable defaults to true if the Agent is in use,
and false otherwise.
nnimap-search-uids-not-since-is-evilUID SEARCH UID message numbers NOT SINCE
date command, which is slow on some IMAP servers
(notably, some versions of Courier). Instead, use UID SEARCH SINCE
date and prune the list of expirable articles within Gnus.
When Gnus expires your mail (see Expiring Mail), it starts with a list of expirable articles and asks the IMAP server questions like “Of these articles, which ones are older than a week?” While this seems like a perfectly reasonable question, some IMAP servers take a long time to answer it, since they seemingly go looking into every old article to see if it is one of the expirable ones. Curiously, the question “Of all articles, which ones are newer than a week?” seems to be much faster to answer, so setting this variable causes Gnus to ask this question and figure out the answer to the real question itself.
This problem can really sneak up on you: when you first configure Gnus, everything works fine, but once you accumulate a couple thousand messages, you start cursing Gnus for being so slow. On the other hand, if you get a lot of email within a week, setting this variable will cause a lot of network traffic between Gnus and the IMAP server.
Splitting is something Gnus users have loved and used for years, and now the rest of the world is catching up. Yeah, dream on, not many IMAP servers have server side splitting and those that have splitting seem to use some non-standard protocol. This means that IMAP support for Gnus has to do its own splitting.
And it does.
(Incidentally, people seem to have been dreaming on, and Sieve has gaining a market share and is supported by several IMAP servers. Fortunately, Gnus support it too, See Sieve Commands.)
Here are the variables of interest:
nnimap-split-crosspostnil, do crossposting if several split methods match the
mail. If nil, the first match in nnimap-split-rule
found will be used.
Nnmail equivalent: nnmail-crosspost.
nnimap-split-inboxnil, which means that
splitting is disabled!
(setq nnimap-split-inbox
'("INBOX" ("~/friend/Mail" . "lists/*") "lists.imap"))
No nnmail equivalent.
nnimap-split-rulennimap-split-inbox will be split according to
this variable.
This variable contains a list of lists, where the first element in the sublist gives the name of the IMAP mailbox to move articles matching the regexp in the second element in the sublist. Got that? Neither did I, we need examples.
(setq nnimap-split-rule
'(("INBOX.nnimap"
"^Sender: owner-nnimap@vic20.globalcom.se")
("INBOX.junk" "^Subject:.*MAKE MONEY")
("INBOX.private" "")))
This will put all articles from the nnimap mailing list into mailbox INBOX.nnimap, all articles containing MAKE MONEY in the Subject: line into INBOX.junk and everything else in INBOX.private.
The first string may contain `\\1' forms, like the ones used by replace-match to insert sub-expressions from the matched text. For instance:
("INBOX.lists.\\1" "^Sender: owner-\\([a-z-]+\\)@")
The first element can also be the symbol junk to indicate that
matching messages should simply be deleted. Use with care.
The second element can also be a function. In that case, it will be
called with the first element of the rule as the argument, in a buffer
containing the headers of the article. It should return a
non-nil value if it thinks that the mail belongs in that group.
Nnmail users might recollect that the last regexp had to be empty to match all articles (like in the example above). This is not required in nnimap. Articles not matching any of the regexps will not be moved out of your inbox. (This might affect performance if you keep lots of unread articles in your inbox, since the splitting code would go over them every time you fetch new mail.)
These rules are processed from the beginning of the alist toward the end. The first rule to make a match will “win”, unless you have crossposting enabled. In that case, all matching rules will “win”.
This variable can also have a function as its value, the function will
be called with the headers narrowed and should return a group where it
thinks the article should be split to. See nnimap-split-fancy.
The splitting code tries to create mailboxes if it needs to.
To allow for different split rules on different virtual servers, and even different split rules in different inboxes on the same server, the syntax of this variable have been extended along the lines of:
(setq nnimap-split-rule
'(("my1server" (".*" (("ding" "ding@gnus.org")
("junk" "From:.*Simon"))))
("my2server" ("INBOX" nnimap-split-fancy))
("my[34]server" (".*" (("private" "To:.*Simon")
("junk" my-junk-func))))))
The virtual server name is in fact a regexp, so that the same rules
may apply to several servers. In the example, the servers
my3server and my4server both use the same rules.
Similarly, the inbox string is also a regexp. The actual splitting
rules are as before, either a function, or a list with group/regexp or
group/function elements.
Nnmail equivalent: nnmail-split-methods.
nnimap-split-predicatennimap-split-inbox will be
split, it is a string and the default is `UNSEEN UNDELETED'.
This might be useful if you use another IMAP client to read mail in
your inbox but would like Gnus to split all articles in the inbox
regardless of readedness. Then you might change this to
`UNDELETED'.
nnimap-split-fancynnimap-split-rule to
nnmail-split-fancy if you want to use fancy
splitting. See Fancy Mail Splitting.
However, to be able to have different fancy split rules for nnmail and
nnimap back ends you can set nnimap-split-rule to
nnimap-split-fancy and define the nnimap specific fancy split
rule in nnimap-split-fancy.
Example:
(setq nnimap-split-rule 'nnimap-split-fancy
nnimap-split-fancy ...)
Nnmail equivalent: nnmail-split-fancy.
nnimap-split-download-bodynil to download entire articles during splitting.
This is generally not required, and will slow things down
considerably. You may need it if you want to use an advanced
splitting function that analyzes the body to split the article.
Even though nnimap is not a proper nnmail derived back
end, it supports most features in regular expiring (see Expiring Mail). Unlike splitting in IMAP (see Splitting in IMAP) it does not clone the nnmail variables (i.e., creating
nnimap-expiry-wait) but reuse the nnmail variables. What
follows below are the variables used by the nnimap expiry
process.
A note on how the expire mark is stored on the IMAP server is
appropriate here as well. The expire mark is translated into a
imap client specific mark, gnus-expire, and stored on the
message. This means that likely only Gnus will understand and treat
the gnus-expire mark properly, although other clients may allow
you to view client specific flags on the message. It also means that
your server must support permanent storage of client specific flags on
messages. Most do, fortunately.
If expiring IMAP mail seems very slow, try setting the server
variable nnimap-search-uids-not-since-is-evil.
nnmail-expiry-waitnnmail-expiry-wait-functionimmediate or never.
nnmail-expiry-targetnnmail functions that handle this. It contains an optimization
that if the destination is a IMAP group on the same server, the
article is copied instead of appended (that is, uploaded again).
ACL stands for Access Control List. ACLs are used in IMAP for limiting (or enabling) other users access to your mail boxes. Not all IMAP servers support this, this function will give an error if it doesn't.
To edit an ACL for a mailbox, type G l
(gnus-group-edit-nnimap-acl) and you'll be presented with an ACL
editing window with detailed instructions.
Some possible uses:
If you're using the never setting of nnimap-expunge-on-close,
you may want the option of expunging all deleted articles in a mailbox
manually. This is exactly what G x does.
Currently there is no way of showing deleted articles, you can just delete them.
The IMAP protocol has a concept called namespaces, described by the following text in the RFC2060:
5.1.2. Mailbox Namespace Naming Convention
By convention, the first hierarchical element of any mailbox name
which begins with "#" identifies the "namespace" of the remainder of
the name. This makes it possible to disambiguate between different
types of mailbox stores, each of which have their own namespaces.
For example, implementations which offer access to USENET
newsgroups MAY use the "#news" namespace to partition the USENET
newsgroup namespace from that of other mailboxes. Thus, the
comp.mail.misc newsgroup would have an mailbox name of
"#news.comp.mail.misc", and the name "comp.mail.misc" could refer
to a different object (e.g. a user's private mailbox).
While there is nothing in this text that warrants concern for the IMAP implementation in Gnus, some servers use namespace prefixes in a way that does not work with how Gnus uses mailbox names.
Specifically, University of Washington's IMAP server uses
mailbox names like #driver.mbx/read-mail which are valid only
in the create and append commands. After the mailbox is
created (or a messages is appended to a mailbox), it must be accessed
without the namespace prefix, i.e. read-mail. Since Gnus do
not make it possible for the user to guarantee that user entered
mailbox names will only be used with the CREATE and APPEND commands,
you should simply not use the namespace prefixed mailbox names in
Gnus.
See the UoW IMAPD documentation for the #driver.*/ prefix
for more information on how to use the prefixes. They are a power
tool and should be used only if you are sure what the effects are.
IMAP is a complex protocol, more so than NNTP or POP3. Implementation bugs are not unlikely, and we do our best to fix them right away. If you encounter odd behavior, chances are that either the server or Gnus is buggy.
If you are familiar with network protocols in general, you will probably be able to extract some clues from the protocol dump of the exchanges between Gnus and the server. Even if you are not familiar with network protocols, when you include the protocol dump in IMAP-related bug reports you are helping us with data critical to solving the problem. Therefore, we strongly encourage you to include the protocol dump when reporting IMAP bugs in Gnus.
Because the protocol dump, when enabled, generates lots of data, it is
disabled by default. You can enable it by setting imap-log as
follows:
(setq imap-log t)
This instructs the imap.el package to log any exchanges with
the server. The log is stored in the buffer `*imap-log*'. Look
for error messages, which sometimes are tagged with the keyword
BAD—but when submitting a bug, make sure to include all the
data.
Gnus can do more than just read news or mail. The methods described below allow Gnus to view directories and files as if they were newsgroups.
If you have a directory that has lots of articles in separate files in it, you might treat it as a newsgroup. The files have to have numerical names, of course.
This might be an opportune moment to mention ange-ftp (and its
successor efs), that most wonderful of all wonderful Emacs
packages. When I wrote nndir, I didn't think much about it—a
back end to read directories. Big deal.
ange-ftp changes that picture dramatically. For instance, if you
enter the ange-ftp file name
/ftp.hpc.uh.edu:/pub/emacs/ding-list/ as the directory name,
ange-ftp or efs will actually allow you to read this
directory over at `sina' as a newsgroup. Distributed news ahoy!
nndir will use NOV files if they are present.
nndir is a “read-only” back end—you can't delete or expire
articles with this method. You can use nnmh or nnml for
whatever you use nndir for, so you could switch to any of those
methods if you feel the need to have a non-read-only nndir.
From the nndir back end (which reads a single spool-like
directory), it's just a hop and a skip to nneething, which
pretends that any arbitrary directory is a newsgroup. Strange, but
true.
When nneething is presented with a directory, it will scan this
directory and assign article numbers to each file. When you enter such
a group, nneething must create “headers” that Gnus can use.
After all, Gnus is a newsreader, in case you're forgetting.
nneething does this in a two-step process. First, it snoops each
file in question. If the file looks like an article (i.e., the first
few lines look like headers), it will use this as the head. If this is
just some arbitrary file without a head (e.g. a C source file),
nneething will cobble up a header out of thin air. It will use
file ownership, name and date and do whatever it can with these
elements.
All this should happen automatically for you, and you will be presented with something that looks very much like a newsgroup. Totally like a newsgroup, to be precise. If you select an article, it will be displayed in the article buffer, just as usual.
If you select a line that represents a directory, Gnus will pop you into
a new summary buffer for this nneething group. And so on. You can
traverse the entire disk this way, if you feel like, but remember that
Gnus is not dired, really, and does not intend to be, either.
There are two overall modes to this action—ephemeral or solid. When
doing the ephemeral thing (i.e., G D from the group buffer), Gnus
will not store information on what files you have read, and what files
are new, and so on. If you create a solid nneething group the
normal way with G m, Gnus will store a mapping table between
article numbers and file names, and you can treat this group like any
other groups. When you activate a solid nneething group, you will
be told how many unread articles it contains, etc., etc.
Some variables:
nneething-map-file-directorynneething groups will be stored
in this directory, which defaults to ~/.nneething/.
nneething-exclude-filesnneething-include-filesnil, only files matching this regexp will be included.
nneething-map-file
nndoc is a cute little thing that will let you read a single file
as a newsgroup. Several files types are supported:
babylmboxmmdfnewsrnewsnsmailmime-partsstandard-digestmime-digestlanl-gov-announcerfc822-forwardoutlookoe-dbxexim-bounceforwardrfc934mailmanclari-briefsslack-digestmail-in-mailYou can also use the special “file type” guess, which means
that nndoc will try to guess what file type it is looking at.
digest means that nndoc should guess what digest type the
file is.
nndoc will not try to change the file or insert any extra headers into
it—it will simply, like, let you use the file as the basis for a
group. And that's it.
If you have some old archived articles that you want to insert into your
new & spiffy Gnus mail back end, nndoc can probably help you with
that. Say you have an old RMAIL file with mail that you now want
to split into your new nnml groups. You look at that file using
nndoc (using the G f command in the group buffer
(see Foreign Groups)), set the process mark on all the articles in
the buffer (M P b, for instance), and then re-spool (B r)
using nnml. If all goes well, all the mail in the RMAIL
file is now also stored in lots of nnml directories, and you can
delete that pesky RMAIL file. If you have the guts!
Virtual server variables:
nndoc-article-typembox, babyl, digest,
news, rnews, mmdf, forward, rfc934,
rfc822-forward, mime-parts, standard-digest,
slack-digest, clari-briefs, nsmail, outlook,
oe-dbx, mailman, and mail-in-mail or guess.
nndoc-post-typemail (the default)
and news.
Adding new document types to be recognized by nndoc isn't
difficult. You just have to whip up a definition of what the document
looks like, write a predicate function to recognize that document type,
and then hook into nndoc.
First, here's an example document type definition:
(mmdf
(article-begin . "^\^A\^A\^A\^A\n")
(body-end . "^\^A\^A\^A\^A\n"))
The definition is simply a unique name followed by a series of regexp pseudo-variable settings. Below are the possible variables—don't be daunted by the number of variables; most document types can be defined with very few settings:
first-articlenndoc will skip past all text until it finds
something that match this regexp. All text before this will be
totally ignored.
article-beginarticle-begin-function instead of this.
article-begin-functionarticle-begin.
head-beginhead-begin-function instead of this.
head-begin-functionhead-begin.
head-endbody-beginbody-begin-function instead of this.
body-begin-functionbody-begin.
body-endbody-end-function instead of this.
body-end-functionbody-end.
file-beginfile-endSo, using these variables nndoc is able to dissect a document
file into a series of articles, each with a head and a body. However, a
few more variables are needed since not all document types are all that
news-like—variables needed to transform the head or the body into
something that's palatable for Gnus:
prepare-body-functionarticle-transform-functiongenerate-head-functiongenerate-article-functiondissection-functionfirst-article, article-begin,
article-begin-function, head-begin,
head-begin-function, head-end, body-begin,
body-begin-function, body-end, body-end-function,
file-begin, and file-end.
Let's look at the most complicated example I can come up with—standard digests:
(standard-digest
(first-article . ,(concat "^" (make-string 70 ?-) "\n\n+"))
(article-begin . ,(concat "\n\n" (make-string 30 ?-) "\n\n+"))
(prepare-body-function . nndoc-unquote-dashes)
(body-end-function . nndoc-digest-body-end)
(head-end . "^ ?$")
(body-begin . "^ ?\n")
(file-end . "^End of .*digest.*[0-9].*\n\\*\\*\\|^End of.*Digest *$")
(subtype digest guess))
We see that all text before a 70-width line of dashes is ignored; all
text after a line that starts with that `^End of' is also ignored;
each article begins with a 30-width line of dashes; the line separating
the head from the body may contain a single space; and that the body is
run through nndoc-unquote-dashes before being delivered.
To hook your own document definition into nndoc, use the
nndoc-add-type function. It takes two parameters—the first
is the definition itself and the second (optional) parameter says
where in the document type definition alist to put this definition.
The alist is traversed sequentially, and
nndoc-type-type-p is called for a given type type.
So nndoc-mmdf-type-p is called to see whether a document is of
mmdf type, and so on. These type predicates should return
nil if the document is not of the correct type; t if it
is of the correct type; and a number if the document might be of the
correct type. A high number means high probability; a low number
means low probability with `0' being the lowest valid number.
In the PC world people often talk about “offline” newsreaders. These are thingies that are combined reader/news transport monstrosities. With built-in modem programs. Yecchh!
Of course, us Unix Weenie types of human beans use things like
uucp and, like, nntpd and set up proper news and mail
transport things like Ghod intended. And then we just use normal
newsreaders.
However, it can sometimes be convenient to do something that's a bit easier on the brain if you have a very slow modem, and you're not really that interested in doing things properly.
A file format called soup has been developed for transporting news and mail from servers to home machines and back again. It can be a bit fiddly.
First some terminology:
awk program), or you
can use Gnus to create the packet with its soup commands (O
s and/or G s b; and then G s p) (see SOUP Commands).
nnsoup back end as
the native or secondary server.
So you basically have a bipartite system—you use nnsoup for
reading and Gnus for packing/sending these soup packets.
These are commands for creating and manipulating soup packets.
gnus-group-brew-soup). This command understands the
process/prefix convention.
gnus-soup-save-areas).
gnus-soup-send-replies).
gnus-soup-pack-packet).
nnsoup-pack-replies).
gnus-soup-add-article). It understands the process/prefix
convention (see Process/Prefix).
There are a few variables to customize where Gnus will put all these thingies:
gnus-soup-directorygnus-soup-replies-directorygnus-soup-prefix-filegnus-soup-packergnus-soup-unpackergnus-soup-packet-directorygnus-soup-packet-regexpgnus-soup-packet-directory.
nnsoup is the back end for reading soup packets. It will
read incoming packets, unpack them, and put them in a directory where
you can read them at leisure.
These are the variables you can use to customize its behavior:
nnsoup-tmp-directorynnsoup unpacks a soup packet, it does it in this
directory. (/tmp/ by default.)
nnsoup-directorynnsoup then moves each message and index file to this directory.
The default is ~/SOUP/.
nnsoup-replies-directorynnsoup-replies-format-typennsoup-replies-index-typennsoup-active-filennsoup stores lots of information. This is not an “active
file” in the nntp sense; it's an Emacs Lisp file. If you lose
this file or mess it up in any way, you're dead. The default is
~/SOUP/active.
nnsoup-packernnsoup-unpackernnsoup-packet-directorynnsoup will look for incoming packets. The default is
~/.
nnsoup-packet-regexpnnsoup-always-savenil, save the replies buffer after each posted message.
Just using nnsoup won't mean that your postings and mailings end
up in soup reply packets automagically. You have to work a bit
more for that to happen.
The nnsoup-set-variables command will set the appropriate
variables to ensure that all your followups and replies end up in the
soup system.
In specific, this is what it does:
(setq message-send-news-function 'nnsoup-request-post)
(setq message-send-mail-function 'nnsoup-request-mail)
And that's it, really. If you only want news to go into the soup system you just use the first line. If you only want mail to be souped you use the second.
If your local nntp server doesn't allow posting, for some reason
or other, you can post using one of the numerous mail-to-news gateways.
The nngateway back end provides the interface.
Note that you can't read anything from this back end—it can only be used to post with.
Server variables:
nngateway-addressnngateway-header-transformationnngateway-simple-header-transformation. The function is called
narrowed to the headers to be transformed and with one parameter—the
gateway address.
This default function just inserts a new To header based on the
Newsgroups header and the gateway address.
For instance, an article with this Newsgroups header:
Newsgroups: alt.religion.emacs
will get this To header inserted:
To: alt-religion-emacs@GATEWAY
The following pre-defined functions exist:
Here's an example:
(setq gnus-post-method
'(nngateway
"mail2news@replay.com"
(nngateway-header-transformation
nngateway-mail2news-header-transformation)))
So, to use this, simply say something like:
(setq gnus-post-method '(nngateway "GATEWAY.ADDRESS"))
Gnus allows combining a mixture of all the other group types into bigger groups.
An nnvirtual group is really nothing more than a collection of other groups.
For instance, if you are tired of reading many small groups, you can put them all in one big group, and then grow tired of reading one big, unwieldy group. The joys of computing!
You specify nnvirtual as the method. The address should be a
regexp to match component groups.
All marks in the virtual group will stick to the articles in the
component groups. So if you tick an article in a virtual group, the
article will also be ticked in the component group from whence it
came. (And vice versa—marks from the component groups will also be
shown in the virtual group.). To create an empty virtual group, run
G V (gnus-group-make-empty-virtual) in the group buffer
and edit the method regexp with M-e
(gnus-group-edit-group-method)
Here's an example nnvirtual method that collects all Andrea Dworkin
newsgroups into one, big, happy newsgroup:
(nnvirtual "^alt\\.fan\\.andrea-dworkin$\\|^rec\\.dworkin.*")
The component groups can be native or foreign; everything should work smoothly, but if your computer explodes, it was probably my fault.
Collecting the same group from several servers might actually be a good idea if users have set the Distribution header to limit distribution. If you would like to read `soc.motss' both from a server in Japan and a server in Norway, you could use the following as the group regexp:
"^nntp\\+server\\.jp:soc\\.motss$\\|^nntp\\+server\\.no:soc\\.motss$"
(Remember, though, that if you're creating the group with G m, you shouldn't double the backslashes, and you should leave off the quote characters at the beginning and the end of the string.)
This should work kinda smoothly—all articles from both groups should end up in this one, and there should be no duplicates. Threading (and the rest) will still work as usual, but there might be problems with the sequence of articles. Sorting on date might be an option here (see Selecting a Group).
One limitation, however—all groups included in a virtual
group have to be alive (i.e., subscribed or unsubscribed). Killed or
zombie groups can't be component groups for nnvirtual groups.
If the nnvirtual-always-rescan variable is non-nil (which
is the default), nnvirtual will always scan groups for unread
articles when entering a virtual group. If this variable is nil
and you read articles in a component group after the virtual group has
been activated, the read articles from the component group will show up
when you enter the virtual group. You'll also see this effect if you
have two virtual groups that have a component group in common. If
that's the case, you should set this variable to t. Or you can
just tap M-g on the virtual group every time before you enter
it—it'll have much the same effect.
nnvirtual can have both mail and news groups as component groups.
When responding to articles in nnvirtual groups, nnvirtual
has to ask the back end of the component group the article comes from
whether it is a news or mail back end. However, when you do a ^,
there is typically no sure way for the component back end to know this,
and in that case nnvirtual tells Gnus that the article came from a
not-news back end. (Just to be on the safe side.)
C-c C-n in the message buffer will insert the Newsgroups
line from the article you respond to in these cases.
nnvirtual groups do not inherit anything but articles and marks
from component groups—group parameters, for instance, are not
inherited.
Kibozing is defined by the OED as “grepping through
(parts of) the news feed”. nnkiboze is a back end that will
do this for you. Oh joy! Now you can grind any NNTP server
down to a halt with useless requests! Oh happiness!
To create a kibozed group, use the G k command in the group buffer.
The address field of the nnkiboze method is, as with
nnvirtual, a regexp to match groups to be “included” in the
nnkiboze group. That's where most similarities between
nnkiboze and nnvirtual end.
In addition to this regexp detailing component groups, an
nnkiboze group must have a score file to say what articles are
to be included in the group (see Scoring).
You must run M-x nnkiboze-generate-groups after creating the
nnkiboze groups you want to have. This command will take time.
Lots of time. Oodles and oodles of time. Gnus has to fetch the
headers from all the articles in all the component groups and run them
through the scoring process to determine if there are any articles in
the groups that are to be part of the nnkiboze groups.
Please limit the number of component groups by using restrictive regexps. Otherwise your sysadmin may become annoyed with you, and the NNTP site may throw you off and never let you back in again. Stranger things have happened.
nnkiboze component groups do not have to be alive—they can be dead,
and they can be foreign. No restrictions.
The generation of an nnkiboze group means writing two files in
nnkiboze-directory, which is ~/News/kiboze/ by default.
One contains the NOV header lines for all the articles in
the group, and the other is an additional .newsrc file to store
information on what groups have been searched through to find
component articles.
Articles marked as read in the nnkiboze group will have
their NOV lines removed from the NOV file.
This section describes a special mail back end called nndiary,
and its companion library gnus-diary. It is “special” in the
sense that it is not meant to be one of the standard alternatives for
reading mail with Gnus. See Choosing a Mail Back End for that.
Instead, it is used to treat some of your mails in a special way,
namely, as event reminders.
Here is a typical scenario:
The Gnus Diary back end has the ability to handle regular appointments (that wouldn't ever be deleted) as well as punctual ones, operates as a real mail back end and is configurable in many ways. All of this is explained in the sections below.
nndiary is a back end very similar to nnml (see Mail Spool). Actually, it could appear as a mix of nnml and
nndraft. If you know nnml, you're already familiar with
the message storing scheme of nndiary: one file per message, one
directory per group.
Before anything, there is one requirement to be able to run
nndiary properly: you must use the group timestamp feature
of Gnus. This adds a timestamp to each group's parameters. Group Timestamp to see how it's done.
nndiary messages are just normal ones, except for the mandatory
presence of 7 special headers. These headers are of the form
X-Diary-<something>, <something> being one of
Minute, Hour, Dom, Month, Year,
Time-Zone and Dow. Dom means “Day of Month”, and
dow means “Day of Week”. These headers actually behave like
crontab specifications and define the event date(s):
Time-Zone one, a header value is
either a star (meaning all possible values), or a list of fields
(separated by a comma).
Minute, 0–23 for
Hour, 1–31 for Dom, 1–12 for Month, above 1971
for Year and 0–6 for Dow (0 meaning Sunday).
Dom or Dow doesn't
mean “all possible values”, but “use only the other field”. Note
that if both are star'ed, the use of either one gives the same result.
Time-Zone header is special in that it can only have one
value (GMT, for instance). A star doesn't mean “all possible
values” (because it makes no sense), but “the current local time
zone”. Most of the time, you'll be using a star here. However, for a
list of available time zone values, see the variable
nndiary-headers.
As a concrete example, here are the diary headers to add to your message for specifying “Each Monday and each 1st of month, at 12:00, 20:00, 21:00, 22:00, 23:00 and 24:00, from 1999 to 2010” (I'll let you find what to do then):
X-Diary-Minute: 0
X-Diary-Hour: 12, 20-24
X-Diary-Dom: 1
X-Diary-Month: *
X-Diary-Year: 1999-2010
X-Diary-Dow: 1
X-Diary-Time-Zone: *
nndiary has two modes of operation: “traditional” (the default)
and “autonomous”. In traditional mode, nndiary does not get new
mail by itself. You have to move (B m) or copy (B c) mails
from your primary mail back end to nndiary groups in order to handle them
as diary messages. In autonomous mode, nndiary retrieves its own
mail and handles it independently from your primary mail back end.
One should note that Gnus is not inherently designed to allow several
“master” mail back ends at the same time. However, this does make
sense with nndiary: you really want to send and receive diary
messages to your diary groups directly. So, nndiary supports
being sort of a “second primary mail back end” (to my knowledge, it is
the only back end offering this feature). However, there is a limitation
(which I hope to fix some day): respooling doesn't work in autonomous
mode.
In order to use nndiary in autonomous mode, you have several
things to do:
nndiary to retrieve new mail by itself. Put the following
line in your ~/.gnus.el file:
(setq nndiary-get-new-mail t)
X-Diary-*
headers) to be split in a private folder before Gnus treat them.
Again, this is needed because Gnus cannot (yet ?) properly handle
multiple primary mail back ends. Getting those messages from a separate
source will compensate this misfeature to some extent.
As an example, here's my procmailrc entry to store diary files in
~/.nndiary (the default nndiary mail source file):
:0 HD :
* ^X-Diary
.nndiary
Once this is done, you might want to customize the following two options that affect the diary mail retrieval and splitting processes:
This is the diary-specific replacement for the standard
mail-sourcesvariable. It obeys the same syntax, and defaults to(file :path "~/.nndiary").
This is the diary-specific replacement for the standard
nnmail-split-methodsvariable. It obeys the same syntax.
Finally, you may add a permanent nndiary virtual server
(something like (nndiary "diary") should do) to your
gnus-secondary-select-methods.
Hopefully, almost everything (see the TODO section in nndiary.el) will work as expected when you restart Gnus: in autonomous mode, typing g and M-g in the group buffer, will also get your new diary mails and split them according to your diary-specific rules, F will find your new diary groups etc.
Now that nndiary is up and running, it's time to customize it.
The custom group is called nndiary (no, really ?!). You should
browse it to figure out which options you'd like to tweak. The following
two variables are probably the only ones you will want to change:
This is the list of times when you want to be reminded of your appointments (e.g. 3 weeks before, then 2 days before, then 1 hour before and that's it). Remember that “being reminded” means that the diary message will pop up as brand new and unread again when you get new mail.
Rather self-explanatory. Otherwise, Sunday is assumed (this is the default).
Using nndiary manually (I mean, writing the headers by hand and
so on) would be rather boring. Fortunately, there is a library called
gnus-diary written on top of nndiary, that does many
useful things for you.
In order to use it, add the following line to your ~/.gnus.el file:
(require 'gnus-diary)
Also, you shouldn't use any gnus-user-format-function-[d|D]
(see Summary Buffer Lines). gnus-diary provides both of these
(sorry if you used them before).
Displaying diary messages in standard summary line format (usually something like `From Joe: Subject') is pretty useless. Most of the time, you're the one who wrote the message, and you mostly want to see the event's date.
gnus-diary provides two supplemental user formats to be used in
summary line formats. D corresponds to a formatted time string
for the next occurrence of the event (e.g. “Sat, Sep 22 01, 12:00”),
while d corresponds to an approximative remaining time until the
next occurrence of the event (e.g. “in 6 months, 1 week”).
For example, here's how Joe's birthday is displayed in my
nndiary+diary:birthdays summary buffer (note that the message is
expirable, but will never be deleted, as it specifies a periodic event):
E Sat, Sep 22 01, 12:00: Joe's birthday (in 6 months, 1 week)
In order to get something like the above, you would normally add the following line to your diary groups'parameters:
(gnus-summary-line-format "%U%R%z %uD: %(%s%) (%ud)\n")
However, gnus-diary does it automatically (see Diary Group Parameters). You can however customize the provided summary line format
with the following user options:
Defines the summary line format used for diary groups (see Summary Buffer Lines).
gnus-diaryuses it to automatically update the diary groups'parameters.
Defines the format to display dates in diary summary buffers. This is used by the
Duser format. See the docstring for details.
Defines the format function to use for displaying delays (remaining times) in diary summary buffers. This is used by the
duser format. There are currently built-in functions for English and French; you can also define your own. See the docstring for details.
gnus-diary provides new sorting functions (see Sorting the Summary Buffer ) called gnus-summary-sort-by-schedule,
gnus-thread-sort-by-schedule and
gnus-article-sort-by-schedule. These functions let you organize
your diary summary buffers from the closest event to the farthest one.
gnus-diary automatically installs
gnus-summary-sort-by-schedule as a menu item in the summary
buffer's “sort” menu, and the two others as the primary (hence
default) sorting functions in the group parameters (see Diary Group Parameters).
gnus-diary provides a function called
gnus-diary-check-message to help you handle the X-Diary-*
headers. This function ensures that the current message contains all the
required diary headers, and prompts you for values or corrections if
needed.
This function is hooked into the nndiary back end, so that
moving or copying an article to a diary group will trigger it
automatically. It is also bound to C-c D c in message-mode
and article-edit-mode in order to ease the process of converting
a usual mail to a diary one.
This function takes a prefix argument which will force prompting of all diary headers, regardless of their presence or validity. That way, you can very easily reschedule an already valid diary message, for instance.
When you create a new diary group, or visit one, gnus-diary
automatically checks your group parameters and if needed, sets the
summary line format to the diary-specific value, installs the
diary-specific sorting functions, and also adds the different
X-Diary-* headers to the group's posting-style. It is then easier
to send a diary message, because if you use C-u a or C-u m
on a diary group to prepare a message, these headers will be inserted
automatically (although not filled with proper values yet).
Well, assuming you've read all of the above, here are two final notes on
mail sending with nndiary:
nndiary is a real mail back end. You really send real diary
messsages for real. This means for instance that you can give
appointments to anybody (provided they use Gnus and nndiary) by
sending the diary message to them as well.
nndiary also has a request-post method, you
can also use C-u a instead of C-u m on a diary group and the
message won't actually be sent; just stored locally in the group. This
comes in very handy for private appointments.
In olden times (ca. February '88), people used to run their newsreaders on big machines with permanent connections to the net. News transport was dealt with by news servers, and all the newsreaders had to do was to read news. Believe it or not.
Nowadays most people read news and mail at home, and use some sort of modem to connect to the net. To avoid running up huge phone bills, it would be nice to have a way to slurp down all the news and mail, hang up the phone, read for several hours, and then upload any responses you have to make. And then you repeat the procedure.
Of course, you can use news servers for doing this as well. I've used
inn together with slurp, pop and sendmail
for some years, but doing that's a bore. Moving the news server
functionality up to the newsreader makes sense if you're the only person
reading news on a machine.
Setting up Gnus as an “offline” newsreader is quite simple. In fact, you don't even have to configure anything.
Of course, to use it as such, you have to learn a few new commands.
First, let's get some terminology out of the way.
The Gnus Agent is said to be unplugged when you have severed the connection to the net (and notified the Agent that this is the case). When the connection to the net is up again (and Gnus knows this), the Agent is plugged.
The local machine is the one you're running on, and which isn't connected to the net continuously.
Downloading means fetching things from the net to your local machine. Uploading is doing the opposite.
You know that Gnus gives you all the opportunity you'd ever want for shooting yourself in the foot. Some people call it flexibility. Gnus is also customizable to a great extent, which means that the user has a say on how Gnus behaves. Other newsreaders might unconditionally shoot you in your foot, but with Gnus, you have a choice!
Gnus is never really in plugged or unplugged state. Rather, it applies that state to each server individually. This means that some servers can be plugged while others can be unplugged. Additionally, some servers can be ignored by the Agent altogether (which means that they're kinda like plugged always).
So when you unplug the Agent and then wonder why is Gnus opening a connection to the Net, the next step to do is to look whether all servers are agentized. If there is an unagentized server, you found the culprit.
Another thing is the offline state. Sometimes, servers aren't reachable. When Gnus notices this, it asks you whether you want the server to be switched to offline state. If you say yes, then the server will behave somewhat as if it was unplugged, except that Gnus will ask you whether you want to switch it back online again.
Let's take a typical Gnus session using the Agent.
gnus-unplugged. This brings up the Gnus
Agent in a disconnected state. You can read all the news that you have
already fetched while in this mode.
Here are some things you should do the first time (or so) that you use the Agent.
nntp and nnimap servers in gnus-select-method and
gnus-secondary-select-methods are agentized.
Both topic parameters (see Topic Parameters) and agent categories (see Agent Categories) provide for setting a policy that applies to multiple groups. Which you use is entirely up to you. Topic parameters do override categories so, if you mix the two, you'll have to take that into account. If you have a few groups that deviate from your policy, you can use group parameters (see Group Parameters) to configure them.
One of the main reasons to integrate the news transport layer into the newsreader is to allow greater control over what articles to download. There's not much point in downloading huge amounts of articles, just to find out that you're not interested in reading any of them. It's better to be somewhat more conservative in choosing what to download, and then mark the articles for downloading manually if it should turn out that you're interested in the articles anyway.
One of the more effective methods for controlling what is to be
downloaded is to create a category and then assign some (or all)
groups to this category. Groups that do not belong in any other
category belong to the default category. Gnus has its own
buffer for creating and managing categories.
If you prefer, you can also use group parameters (see Group Parameters) and topic parameters (see Topic Parameters) for an alternative approach to controlling the agent. The only real difference is that categories are specific to the agent (so there is less to learn) while group and topic parameters include the kitchen sink.
Since you can set agent parameters in several different places we have a rule to decide which source to believe. This rule specifies that the parameter sources are checked in the following order: group parameters, topic parameters, agent category, and finally customizable variables. So you can mix all of these sources to produce a wide range of behavior, just don't blame me if you don't remember where you put your settings.
A category consists of a name, the list of groups belonging to the category, and a number of optional parameters that override the customizable variables. The complete list of agent parameters are listed below.
gnus-agent-cat-namegnus-agent-cat-groupsgnus-agent-cat-predicategnus-agent-cat-score-filegnus-agent-cat-enable-expirationgnus-agent-cat-days-until-oldgnus-agent-cat-low-scoregnus-agent-low-score.
gnus-agent-cat-high-scoregnus-agent-high-score.
gnus-agent-cat-length-when-shortgnus-agent-short-article.
gnus-agent-cat-length-when-longgnus-agent-long-article.
gnus-agent-cat-enable-undownloaded-facesThe name of a category can not be changed once the category has been created.
Each category maintains a list of groups that are exclusive members of that category. The exclusivity rule is automatically enforced, add a group to a new category and it is automatically removed from its old category.
A predicate in its simplest form can be a single predicate such as
true or false. These two will download every available
article or nothing respectively. In the case of these two special
predicates an additional score rule is superfluous.
Predicates of high or low download articles in respect of
their scores in relationship to gnus-agent-high-score and
gnus-agent-low-score as described below.
To gain even finer control of what is to be regarded eligible for download a predicate can consist of a number of predicates with logical operators sprinkled in between.
Perhaps some examples are in order.
Here's a simple predicate. (It's the default predicate, in fact, used for all groups that don't belong to any other category.)
short
Quite simple, eh? This predicate is true if and only if the article is short (for some value of “short”).
Here's a more complex predicate:
(or high
(and
(not low)
(not long)))
This means that an article should be downloaded if it has a high score, or if the score is not low and the article is not long. You get the drift.
The available logical operators are or, and and
not. (If you prefer, you can use the more “C”-ish operators
`|', & and ! instead.)
The following predicates are pre-defined, but if none of these fit what you want to do, you can write your own.
When evaluating each of these predicates, the named constant will be
bound to the value determined by calling
gnus-agent-find-parameter on the appropriate parameter. For
example, gnus-agent-short-article will be bound to
(gnus-agent-find-parameter group 'agent-short-article). This
means that you can specify a predicate in your category then tune that
predicate to individual groups.
shortgnus-agent-short-article
lines; default 100.
longgnus-agent-long-article
lines; default 200.
lowgnus-agent-low-score; default 0.
highgnus-agent-high-score; default 0.
spamtruefalseIf you want to create your own predicate function, here's what you have
to know: The functions are called with no parameters, but the
gnus-headers and gnus-score dynamic variables are bound to
useful values.
For example, you could decide that you don't want to download articles
that were posted more than a certain number of days ago (e.g. posted
more than gnus-agent-expire-days ago) you might write a function
something along the lines of the following:
(defun my-article-old-p ()
"Say whether an article is old."
(< (time-to-days (date-to-time (mail-header-date gnus-headers)))
(- (time-to-days (current-time)) gnus-agent-expire-days)))
with the predicate then defined as:
(not my-article-old-p)
or you could append your predicate to the predefined
gnus-category-predicate-alist in your ~/.gnus.el or
wherever.
(require 'gnus-agent)
(setq gnus-category-predicate-alist
(append gnus-category-predicate-alist
'((old . my-article-old-p))))
and simply specify your predicate as:
(not old)
If/when using something like the above, be aware that there are many misconfigured systems/mailers out there and so an article's date is not always a reliable indication of when it was posted. Hell, some people just don't give a damn.
The above predicates apply to all the groups which belong to the category. However, if you wish to have a specific predicate for an individual group within a category, or you're just too lazy to set up a new category, you can enter a group's individual predicate in its group parameters like so:
(agent-predicate . short)
This is the group/topic parameter equivalent of the agent category default.
Note that when specifying a single word predicate like this, the
agent-predicate specification must be in dotted pair notation.
The equivalent of the longer example from above would be:
(agent-predicate or high (and (not low) (not long)))
The outer parenthesis required in the category specification are not entered here as, not being in dotted pair notation, the value of the predicate is assumed to be a list.
Now, the syntax of the download score is the same as the syntax of
normal score files, except that all elements that require actually
seeing the article itself are verboten. This means that only the
following headers can be scored on: Subject, From,
Date, Message-ID, References, Chars,
Lines, and Xref.
As with predicates, the specification of the download score rule
to use in respect of a group can be in either the category definition if
it's to be applicable to all groups in therein, or a group's parameters
if it's to be specific to that group.
In both of these places the download score rule can take one of
three forms:
This has the same syntax as a normal Gnus score file except only a subset of scoring keywords are available as mentioned above.
example:
(("from"
("Lars Ingebrigtsen" 1000000 nil s))
("lines"
(500 -100 nil <)))
(agent-score ("from"
("Lars Ingebrigtsen" 1000000 nil s))
("lines"
(500 -100 nil <)))
Again, note the omission of the outermost parenthesis here.
These score files must only contain the permitted scoring keywords stated above.
example:
("~/News/agent.SCORE")
or perhaps
("~/News/agent.SCORE" "~/News/agent.group.SCORE")
(agent-score "~/News/agent.SCORE")
Additional score files can be specified as above. Need I say anything about parenthesis?
normal score files
If you don't want to maintain two sets of scoring rules for a group, and
your desired downloading criteria for a group are the same as your
reading criteria then you can tell the agent to refer to your
normal score files when deciding what to download.
These directives in either the category definition or a group's parameters will cause the agent to read in all the applicable score files for a group, filtering out those sections that do not relate to one of the permitted subset of scoring keywords.
file
(agent-score . file)
You'd normally do all category maintenance from the category buffer.
When you enter it for the first time (with the J c command from
the group buffer), you'll only see the default category.
The following commands are available in this buffer:
gnus-category-exit).
gnus-category-customize-category).
gnus-category-kill).
gnus-category-copy).
gnus-category-add).
gnus-category-edit-predicate).
gnus-category-edit-groups).
gnus-category-edit-score).
gnus-category-list).
gnus-category-mode-hookgnus-category-line-formatgnus-category-mode-line-formatgnus-agent-short-articlegnus-agent-long-articlegnus-agent-low-scoregnus-agent-high-scoregnus-agent-expire-daysgnus-agent-enable-expirationENABLE which means that
you'll have to disable expiration when desired. On the other hand,
you could set this to DISABLE. In that case, you would then
have to enable expiration in selected groups.
All the Gnus Agent commands are on the J submap. The J j
(gnus-agent-toggle-plugged) command works in all modes, and
toggles the plugged/unplugged state of the Gnus Agent.
gnus-agent-fetch-groups).
gnus-enter-category-buffer).
gnus-agent-fetch-session).
gnus-group-send-queue). See Drafts.
gnus-agent-add-group). This command understands the
process/prefix convention (see Process/Prefix).
gnus-agent-remove-group). This command understands the
process/prefix convention (see Process/Prefix).
gnus-agent-mark-article).
gnus-agent-unmark-article).
gnus-agent-toggle-mark). The download mark is `%' by
default.
gnus-agent-catchup) that are neither cached, downloaded, nor downloadable.
gnus-agent-fetch-group).
gnus-agent-fetch-series).
gnus-agent-summary-fetch-group).
gnus-agent-add-server).
gnus-agent-remove-server).
If you open a summary while unplugged and, Gnus knows from the group's
active range that there are more articles than the headers currently
stored in the Agent, you may see some articles whose subject looks
something like `[Undownloaded article #####]'. These are
placeholders for the missing headers. Aside from setting a mark,
there is not much that can be done with one of these placeholders.
When Gnus finally gets a chance to fetch the group's headers, the
placeholders will automatically be replaced by the actual headers.
You can configure the summary buffer's maneuvering to skip over the
placeholders if you care (See gnus-auto-goto-ignores).
While it may be obvious to all, the only headers and articles available while unplugged are those headers and articles that were fetched into the Agent while previously plugged. To put it another way, “If you forget to fetch something while plugged, you might have a less than satisfying unplugged session”. For this reason, the Agent adds two visual effects to your summary buffer. These effects display the download status of each article so that you always know which articles will be available when unplugged.
The first visual effect is the `%O' spec. If you customize
gnus-summary-line-format to include this specifier, you will add
a single character field that indicates an article's download status.
Articles that have been fetched into either the Agent or the Cache,
will display gnus-downloaded-mark (defaults to `+'). All
other articles will display gnus-undownloaded-mark (defaults to
`-'). If you open a group that has not been agentized, a space
(` ') will be displayed.
The second visual effect are the undownloaded faces. The faces, there
are three indicating the article's score (low, normal, high), seem to
result in a love/hate response from many Gnus users. The problem is
that the face selection is controlled by a list of condition tests and
face names (See gnus-summary-highlight). Each condition is
tested in the order in which it appears in the list so early
conditions have precedence over later conditions. All of this means
that, if you tick an undownloaded article, the article will continue
to be displayed in the undownloaded face rather than the ticked face.
If you use the Agent as a cache (to avoid downloading the same article each time you visit it or to minimize your connection time), the undownloaded face will probably seem like a good idea. The reason being that you do all of our work (marking, reading, deleting) with downloaded articles so the normal faces always appear.
For occasional Agent users, the undownloaded faces may appear to be an
absolutely horrible idea. The issue being that, since most of their
articles have not been fetched into the Agent, most of the normal
faces will be obscured by the undownloaded faces. If this is your
situation, you have two choices available. First, you can completely
disable the undownload faces by customizing
gnus-summary-highlight to delete the three cons-cells that
refer to the gnus-summary-*-undownloaded-face faces. Second,
if you prefer to take a more fine-grained approach, you may set the
agent-disable-undownloaded-faces group parameter to t.
This parameter, like all other agent parameters, may be set on an
Agent Category (see Agent Categories), a Group Topic (see Topic Parameters), or an individual group (see Group Parameters).
When Gnus is plugged, it is not efficient to download headers or articles from the server again, if they are already stored in the Agent. So, Gnus normally only downloads headers once, and stores them in the Agent. These headers are later used when generating the summary buffer, regardless of whether you are plugged or unplugged. Articles are not cached in the Agent by default though (that would potentially consume lots of disk space), but if you have already downloaded an article into the Agent, Gnus will not download the article from the server again but use the locally stored copy instead.
If you so desire, you can configure the agent (see gnus-agent-cache
see Agent Variables) to always download headers and articles while
plugged. Gnus will almost certainly be slower, but it will be kept
synchronized with the server. That last point probably won't make any
sense if you are using a nntp or nnimap back end.
The Agent back end, nnagent, doesn't handle expiry. Well, at
least it doesn't handle it like other back ends. Instead, there are
special gnus-agent-expire and gnus-agent-expire-group
commands that will expire all read articles that are older than
gnus-agent-expire-days days. They can be run whenever you feel
that you're running out of space. Neither are particularly fast or
efficient, and it's not a particularly good idea to interrupt them (with
C-g or anything else) once you've started one of them.
Note that other functions, e.g. gnus-request-expire-articles,
might run gnus-agent-expire for you to keep the agent
synchronized with the group.
The agent parameter agent-enable-expiration may be used to
prevent expiration in selected groups.
If gnus-agent-expire-all is non-nil, the agent
expiration commands will expire all articles—unread, read, ticked
and dormant. If nil (which is the default), only read articles
are eligible for expiry, and unread, ticked and dormant articles will
be kept indefinitely.
If you find that some articles eligible for expiry are never expired,
perhaps some Gnus Agent files are corrupted. There's are special
commands, gnus-agent-regenerate and
gnus-agent-regenerate-group, to fix possible problems.
The local data structures used by nnagent may become corrupted
due to certain exceptional conditions. When this happens,
nnagent functionality may degrade or even fail. The solution
to this problem is to repair the local data structures by removing all
internal inconsistencies.
For example, if your connection to your server is lost while
downloaded articles into the agent, the local data structures will not
know about articles successfully downloaded prior to the connection
failure. Running gnus-agent-regenerate or
gnus-agent-regenerate-group will update the data structures
such that you don't need to download these articles a second time.
The command gnus-agent-regenerate will perform
gnus-agent-regenerate-group on every agentized group. While
you can run gnus-agent-regenerate in any buffer, it is strongly
recommended that you first close all summary buffers.
The command gnus-agent-regenerate-group uses the local copies
of individual articles to repair the local NOV(header) database. It
then updates the internal data structures that document which articles
are stored locally. An optional argument will mark articles in the
agent as unread.
The Agent works with any Gnus back end, including nnimap. However, since there are some conceptual differences between NNTP and IMAP, this section (should) provide you with some information to make Gnus Agent work smoother as a IMAP Disconnected Mode client.
The first thing to keep in mind is that all flags (read, ticked, etc) are kept on the IMAP server, rather than in .newsrc as is the case for nntp. Thus Gnus need to remember flag changes when disconnected, and synchronize these flags when you plug back in.
Gnus keeps track of flag changes when reading nnimap groups under the
Agent. When you plug back in, Gnus will check if you have any changed
any flags and ask if you wish to synchronize these with the server.
The behavior is customizable by gnus-agent-synchronize-flags.
If gnus-agent-synchronize-flags is nil, the Agent will
never automatically synchronize flags. If it is ask, which is
the default, the Agent will check if you made any changes and if so
ask if you wish to synchronize these when you re-connect. If it has
any other value, all flags will be synchronized automatically.
If you do not wish to synchronize flags automatically when you
re-connect, you can do it manually with the
gnus-agent-synchronize-flags command that is bound to J Y
in the group buffer.
Some things are currently not implemented in the Agent that you'd might expect from a disconnected IMAP client, including:
Technical note: the synchronization algorithm does not work by “pushing”
all local flags to the server, but rather incrementally update the
server view of flags by changing only those flags that were changed by
the user. Thus, if you set one flag on an article, quit the group and
re-select the group and remove the flag; the flag will be set and
removed from the server when you “synchronize”. The queued flag
operations can be found in the per-server flags file in the Agent
directory. It's emptied when you synchronize flags.
When Gnus is unplugged, all outgoing messages (both mail and news) are stored in the draft group “queue” (see Drafts). You can view them there after posting, and edit them at will.
When Gnus is plugged again, you can send the messages either from the draft group with the special commands available there, or you can use the J S command in the group buffer to send all the sendable messages in the draft group.
gnus-agent-directorygnus-agent-handle-levelgnus-level-subscribed,
which means that only subscribed group will be considered by the Agent
by default.
gnus-agent-plugged-hookgnus-agent-unplugged-hookgnus-agent-fetched-hookgnus-agent-cachenil, which means to use the Agent as a cache.
gnus-agent-go-onlinegnus-agent-go-online is nil, the Agent will never
automatically switch offline servers into online status. If it is
ask, the default, the Agent will ask if you wish to switch
offline servers into online status when you re-connect. If it has any
other value, all offline servers will be automatically switched into
online status.
gnus-agent-mark-unread-after-downloadedgnus-agent-mark-unread-after-downloaded is non-nil,
mark articles as unread after downloading. This is usually a safe
thing to do as the newly downloaded article has obviously not been
read. The default is t.
gnus-agent-consider-all-articlesgnus-agent-consider-all-articles is non-nil, the
agent will let the agent predicate decide whether articles need to be
downloaded or not, for all articles. When nil, the default,
the agent will only let the predicate decide whether unread articles
are downloaded or not. If you enable this, you may also want to look
into the agent expiry settings (see Category Variables), so that
the agent doesn't download articles which the agent will later expire,
over and over again.
gnus-agent-max-fetch-sizegnus-agent-max-fetch-size provides a size
limit to control how often the cycling occurs. A large value improves
performance. A small value minimizes the time lost should the
connection be lost while fetching (You may need to run
gnus-agent-regenerate-group to update the group's state.
However, all articles parsed prior to loosing the connection will be
available while unplugged). The default is 10M so it is unusual to
see any cycling.
gnus-server-unopen-statusnil, makes Gnus ask the user
whether to deny the server or whether to unplug the agent. If the
Agent is disabled, Gnus always simply deny the server. Other choices
for this variable include denied and offline the latter
is only valid if the Agent is used.
gnus-auto-goto-ignoresThe valid values are nil (maneuver to any article),
undownloaded (maneuvering while unplugged ignores articles that
have not been fetched), always-undownloaded (maneuvering always
ignores articles that have not been fetched), unfetched
(maneuvering ignores articles whose headers have not been fetched).
gnus-agent-auto-agentize-methodsIf you don't want to read this manual, and you have a fairly standard setup, you may be able to use something like the following as your ~/.gnus.el file to get started.
;; Define how Gnus is to fetch news. We do this over NNTP ;; from your ISP's server. (setq gnus-select-method '(nntp "news.your-isp.com")) ;; Define how Gnus is to read your mail. We read mail from ;; your ISP's POP server. (setq mail-sources '((pop :server "pop.your-isp.com"))) ;; Say how Gnus is to store the mail. We use nnml groups. (setq gnus-secondary-select-methods '((nnml ""))) ;; Make Gnus into an offline newsreader. ;; (gnus-agentize) ; The obsolete setting. ;; (setq gnus-agent t) ; Now the default.
That should be it, basically. Put that in your ~/.gnus.el file, edit to suit your needs, start up PPP (or whatever), and type M-x gnus.
If this is the first time you've run Gnus, you will be subscribed automatically to a few default newsgroups. You'll probably want to subscribe to more groups, and to do that, you have to query the NNTP server for a complete list of groups with the A A command. This usually takes quite a while, but you only have to do it once.
After reading and parsing a while, you'll be presented with a list of groups. Subscribe to the ones you want to read with the u command. l to make all the killed groups disappear after you've subscribe to all the groups you want to read. (A k will bring back all the killed groups.)
You can now read the groups at once, or you can download the articles with the J s command. And then read the rest of this manual to find out which of the other gazillion things you want to customize.
Having the Gnus Agent fetch articles (and post whatever messages you've written) is quite easy once you've gotten things set up properly. The following shell script will do everything that is necessary:
You can run a complete batch command from the command line with the following incantation:
#!/bin/sh
emacs -batch -l ~/.emacs -l ~/.gnus.el -f gnus-agent-batch >/dev/null 2>&1
The Gnus Agent doesn't seem to work like most other offline newsreaders. Here are some common questions that some imaginary people may ask:
gnus-agent-fetch-selected-article to
gnus-select-article-hook.
No, unless gnus-agent-cache is nil.
In short, when Gnus is unplugged, it only looks into the locally stored articles; when it's plugged, it talks to your ISP and may also use the locally stored articles.
Other people use kill files, but we here at Gnus Towers like scoring better than killing, so we'd rather switch than fight. They do something completely different as well, so sit up straight and pay attention!
All articles have a default score (gnus-summary-default-score),
which is 0 by default. This score may be raised or lowered either
interactively or by score files. Articles that have a score lower than
gnus-summary-mark-below are marked as read.
Gnus will read any score files that apply to the current group before generating the summary buffer.
There are several commands in the summary buffer that insert score entries based on the current article. You can, for instance, ask Gnus to lower or increase the score of all articles with a certain subject.
There are two sorts of scoring entries: Permanent and temporary. Temporary score entries are self-expiring entries. Any entries that are temporary and have not been used for, say, a week, will be removed silently to help keep the sizes of the score files down.
The score commands that alter score entries do not actually modify real score files. That would be too inefficient. Gnus maintains a cache of previously loaded score files, one of which is considered the current score file alist. The score commands simply insert entries into this list, and upon group exit, this list is saved.
The current score file is by default the group's local score file, even if no such score file actually exists. To insert score commands into some other score file (e.g. all.SCORE), you must first make this score file the current one.
General score commands that don't actually change the score file:
gnus-summary-set-score).
gnus-summary-current-score).
gnus-score-find-trace). In the *Score Trace* buffer, you
may type e to edit score file corresponding to the score rule on
current line and f to format (gnus-score-pretty-print) the
score file and edit it.
gnus-score-find-favourite-words).
gnus-summary-rescore). This might be useful if you're playing
around with your score files behind Gnus' back and want to see the
effect you're having.
gnus-score-change-score-file).
gnus-score-edit-current-scores).
You will be popped into a gnus-score-mode buffer (see Score File Editing).
gnus-score-edit-file).
gnus-score-flush-cache). This is useful
after editing score files.
gnus-score-customize).
The rest of these commands modify the local score file.
gnus-score-set-mark-below).
gnus-score-set-expunge-below).
The keystrokes for actually making score entries follow a very regular pattern, so there's no need to list all the commands. (Hundreds of them.)
Xref line—i.e., the cross-posting line.
References line.
Message-ID header.
stringsdatenumberSo, let's say you want to increase the score on the current author with exact matching permanently: I a e p. If you want to lower the score based on the subject line, using substring matching, and make a temporary score entry: L s s t. Pretty easy.
To make things a bit more complicated, there are shortcuts. If you use a capital letter on either the second or third keys, Gnus will use defaults for the remaining one or two keystrokes. The defaults are “substring” and “temporary”. So I A is the same as I a s t, and I a R is the same as I a r t.
These functions take both the numerical prefix and the symbolic prefix
(see Symbolic Prefixes). A numerical prefix says how much to lower
(or increase) the score of the article. A symbolic prefix of a
says to use the all.SCORE file for the command instead of the
current score file.
The gnus-score-mimic-keymap says whether these commands will
pretend they are keymaps or not.
There aren't many of these as yet, I'm afraid.
gnus-score-flush-cache).
You can do scoring from the command line by saying something like:
$ emacs -batch -l ~/.emacs -l ~/.gnus.el -f gnus-batch-score
gnus-use-scoringnil, Gnus will not check for score files, and will not, in
general, do any score-related work. This is t by default.
gnus-kill-killednil, Gnus will never apply score files to
articles that have already been through the kill process. While this
may save you lots of time, it also means that if you apply a kill file
to a group, and then change the kill file and want to run it over you
group again to kill more articles, it won't work. You have to set this
variable to t to do that. (It is t by default.)
gnus-kill-files-directorygnus-score-file-suffixgnus-score-uncacheable-filesgnus-save-scoret. This will make
Gnus save the scores into the .newsrc.eld file.
If you do not set this to t, then manual scores (like those set
with V s (gnus-summary-set-score)) will not be preserved
across group visits.
gnus-score-interactive-default-scoregnus-summary-default-scoregnus-summary-expunge-belownil by default, which means that no
articles will be hidden. This variable is local to the summary buffers,
and has to be set from gnus-summary-mode-hook.
gnus-score-over-markgnus-score-below-markgnus-score-find-score-files-functionPredefined functions available are:
gnus-score-find-singlegnus-score-find-bnewsThis means that if you have some score entries that you want to apply to all groups, then you put those entries in the all.SCORE file.
The score files are applied in a semi-random order, although Gnus will
try to apply the more general score files before the more specific score
files. It does this by looking at the number of elements in the score
file names—discarding the `all' elements.
gnus-score-find-hierarchicalFor example, to do hierarchical scoring but use a non-server-specific overall score file, you could use the value
(list (lambda (group) ("all.SCORE"))
'gnus-score-find-hierarchical)
gnus-score-expiry-daysnil, no score file entries
are expired. It's 7 by default.
gnus-update-score-entry-datesnil, temporary score entries that have
been triggered (matched) will have their dates updated. (This is how Gnus
controls expiry—all non-matched-entries will become too old while
matched entries will stay fresh and young.) However, if you set this
variable to nil, even matched entries will grow old and will
have to face that oh-so grim reaper.
gnus-score-after-write-file-functiongnus-score-thread-simplifynil, article subjects will be
simplified for subject scoring purposes in the same manner as with
threading—according to the current value of
gnus-simplify-subject-functions. If the scoring entry uses
substring or exact matching, the match will also be
simplified in this manner.
A score file is an emacs-lisp file that normally contains just a
single form. Casual users are not expected to edit these files;
everything can be changed from the summary buffer.
Anyway, if you'd like to dig into it yourself, here's an example:
(("from"
("Lars Ingebrigtsen" -10000)
("Per Abrahamsen")
("larsi\\|lmi" -50000 nil R))
("subject"
("Ding is Badd" nil 728373))
("xref"
("alt.politics" -1000 728372 s))
("lines"
(2 -100 nil <))
(mark 0)
(expunge -1000)
(mark-and-expunge -10)
(read-only nil)
(orphan -10)
(adapt t)
(files "/hom/larsi/News/gnu.SCORE")
(exclude-files "all.SCORE")
(local (gnus-newsgroup-auto-expire t)
(gnus-summary-make-false-root empty))
(eval (ding)))
This example demonstrates most score file elements. See Advanced Scoring, for a different approach.
Even though this looks much like Lisp code, nothing here is actually
evaled. The Lisp reader is used to read this form, though, so it
has to be valid syntactically, if not semantically.
Six keys are supported by this alist:
STRINGFrom, Subject, References, Message-ID,
Xref, Lines, Chars and Date. In addition to
these headers, there are three strings to tell Gnus to fetch the entire
article and do the match on larger parts of the article: Body
will perform the match on the body of the article, Head will
perform the match on the head of the article, and All will
perform the match on the entire article. Note that using any of these
last three keys will slow down group entry considerably. The
final “header” you can score on is Followup. These score
entries will result in new score entries being added for all follow-ups
to articles that matches these score entries.
Following this key is an arbitrary number of score entries, where each score entry has one to four elements.
gnus-score-interactive-default-score number will be used
instead. This is 1000 by default.
r and R (regexp), as
well as s and S (substring) types, and e and
E (exact match), and w (word match) types. If this
element is not present, Gnus will assume that substring matching should
be used. R, S, and E differ from the others in
that the matches will be done in a case-sensitive manner. All these
one-letter types are really just abbreviations for the regexp,
string, exact, and word types, which you can use
instead, if you feel like.
("111.222.333.444" -1000 nil s
"NNTP-Posting-Host")
<, >,
=, >= and <=.
These predicates are true if
(PREDICATE HEADER MATCH)
evaluates to non-nil. For instance, the advanced match
("lines" 4 <) (see Advanced Scoring) will result in the
following form:
(< header-value 4)
Or to put it another way: When using < on Lines with 4 as
the match, we get the score added if the article has less than 4 lines.
(It's easy to get confused and think it's the other way around. But
it's not. I think.)
When matching on Lines, be careful because some back ends (like
nndir) do not generate Lines header, so every article ends
up being marked as having 0 lines. This can lead to strange results if
you happen to lower score of the articles with few lines.
before, at and after. I can't really imagine this
ever being useful, but, like, it would feel kinda silly not to provide
this function. Just in case. You never know. Better safe than sorry.
Once burnt, twice shy. Don't judge a book by its cover. Never not have
sex on a first date. (I have been told that at least one person, and I
quote, “found this function indispensable”, however.)
A more useful match type is regexp. With it, you can match the
date string using a regular expression. The date is normalized to
ISO8601 compact format first—YYYYMMDDTHHMMSS. If
you want to match all articles that have been posted on April 1st in
every year, you could use `....0401.........' as a match string,
for instance. (Note that the date is kept in its original time zone, so
this will match articles that were posted when it was April 1st where
the article was posted from. Time zones are such wholesome fun for the
whole family, eh?)
From (etc)
header uses.
From header, and affect the score of not only the matching
articles, but also all followups to the matching articles. This allows
you e.g. increase the score of followups to your own articles, or
decrease the score of followups to the articles of some known
trouble-maker. Uses the same match types as the From header
uses. (Using this match key will lead to creation of ADAPT
files.)
Followup match
key. If you say that you want to score on a (sub-)thread started by an
article with a Message-ID x, then you add a `thread'
match. This will add a new `thread' match for each article that
has x in its References header. (These new `thread'
matches will use the Message-IDs of these matching articles.)
This will ensure that you can raise/lower the score of an entire thread,
even though some articles in the thread may not have complete
References headers. Note that using this may lead to
undeterministic scores of the articles in the thread. (Using this match
key will lead to creation of ADAPT files.)
markexpungemark-and-expungethread-mark-and-expungegnus-thread-score-function
says how to compute the total score for a thread.
filesexclude-filesevalevalel. This element will be
ignored when handling global score files.
read-onlyorphanYou can do this with the following two score file entries:
(orphan -500)
(mark-and-expunge -100)
When you enter the group the first time, you will only see the new threads. You then raise the score of the threads that you find interesting (with I T or I S), and ignore (C y) the rest. Next time you enter the group, you will see new articles in the interesting threads, plus any new threads.
I.e.—the orphan score atom is for high-volume groups where a few
interesting threads which can't be found automatically by ordinary
scoring rules exist.
adaptt, the
default adaptive scoring rules will be used. If it is ignore, no
adaptive scoring will be performed on this group. If it is a list, this
list will be used as the adaptive scoring rules. If it isn't present,
or is something other than t or ignore, the default
adaptive scoring rules will be used. If you want to use adaptive
scoring on most groups, you'd set gnus-use-adaptive-scoring to
t, and insert an (adapt ignore) in the groups where you do
not want adaptive scoring. If you only want adaptive scoring in a few
groups, you'd set gnus-use-adaptive-scoring to nil, and
insert (adapt t) in the score files of the groups where you want
it.
adapt-filelocal(var
value) pairs. Each var will be made buffer-local to the
current summary buffer, and set to the value specified. This is a
convenient, if somewhat strange, way of setting variables in some
groups if you don't like hooks much. Note that the value won't
be evaluated.
You normally enter all scoring commands from the summary buffer, but you might feel the urge to edit them by hand as well, so we've supplied you with a mode for that.
It's simply a slightly customized emacs-lisp mode, with these
additional commands:
gnus-score-edit-done).
gnus-score-edit-insert-date). This is really the day number, if
you were wondering.
gnus-score-pretty-print) does that for
you.
Type M-x gnus-score-mode to use this mode.
gnus-score-menu-hook is run in score mode buffers.
In the summary buffer you can use commands like V f, V e and V t to begin editing score files.
If all this scoring is getting you down, Gnus has a way of making it all happen automatically—as if by magic. Or rather, as if by artificial stupidity, to be precise.
When you read an article, or mark an article as read, or kill an
article, you leave marks behind. On exit from the group, Gnus can sniff
these marks and add score elements depending on what marks it finds.
You turn on this ability by setting gnus-use-adaptive-scoring to
t or (line). If you want score adaptively on separate
words appearing in the subjects, you should set this variable to
(word). If you want to use both adaptive methods, set this
variable to (word line).
To give you complete control over the scoring process, you can customize
the gnus-default-adaptive-score-alist variable. For instance, it
might look something like this:
(setq gnus-default-adaptive-score-alist
'((gnus-unread-mark)
(gnus-ticked-mark (from 4))
(gnus-dormant-mark (from 5))
(gnus-del-mark (from -4) (subject -1))
(gnus-read-mark (from 4) (subject 2))
(gnus-expirable-mark (from -1) (subject -1))
(gnus-killed-mark (from -1) (subject -3))
(gnus-kill-file-mark)
(gnus-ancient-mark)
(gnus-low-score-mark)
(gnus-catchup-mark (from -1) (subject -1))))
As you see, each element in this alist has a mark as a key (either a
variable name or a “real” mark—a character). Following this key is
a arbitrary number of header/score pairs. If there are no header/score
pairs following the key, no adaptive scoring will be done on articles
that have that key as the article mark. For instance, articles with
gnus-unread-mark in the example above will not get adaptive score
entries.
Each article can have only one mark, so just a single of these rules will be applied to each article.
To take gnus-del-mark as an example—this alist says that all
articles that have that mark (i.e., are marked with `e') will have a
score entry added to lower based on the From header by -4, and
lowered by Subject by -1. Change this to fit your prejudices.
If you have marked 10 articles with the same subject with
gnus-del-mark, the rule for that mark will be applied ten times.
That means that that subject will get a score of ten times -1, which
should be, unless I'm much mistaken, -10.
If you have auto-expirable (mail) groups (see Expiring Mail), all the read articles will be marked with the `E' mark. This'll probably make adaptive scoring slightly impossible, so auto-expiring and adaptive scoring doesn't really mix very well.
The headers you can score on are from, subject,
message-id, references, xref, lines,
chars and date. In addition, you can score on
followup, which will create an adaptive score entry that matches
on the References header using the Message-ID of the
current article, thereby matching the following thread.
If you use this scheme, you should set the score file atom mark
to something small—like -300, perhaps, to avoid having small random
changes result in articles getting marked as read.
After using adaptive scoring for a week or so, Gnus should start to become properly trained and enhance the authors you like best, and kill the authors you like least, without you having to say so explicitly.
You can control what groups the adaptive scoring is to be performed on by using the score files (see Score File Format). This will also let you use different rules in different groups.
The adaptive score entries will be put into a file where the name is the
group name with gnus-adaptive-file-suffix appended. The default
is ADAPT.
When doing adaptive scoring, substring or fuzzy matching would probably
give you the best results in most cases. However, if the header one
matches is short, the possibility for false positives is great, so if
the length of the match is less than
gnus-score-exact-adapt-limit, exact matching will be used. If
this variable is nil, exact matching will always be used to avoid
this problem.
As mentioned above, you can adapt either on individual words or entire
headers. If you adapt on words, the
gnus-default-adaptive-word-score-alist variable says what score
each instance of a word should add given a mark.
(setq gnus-default-adaptive-word-score-alist
`((,gnus-read-mark . 30)
(,gnus-catchup-mark . -10)
(,gnus-killed-mark . -20)
(,gnus-del-mark . -15)))
This is the default value. If you have adaption on words enabled, every
word that appears in subjects of articles marked with
gnus-read-mark will result in a score rule that increase the
score with 30 points.
Words that appear in the gnus-default-ignored-adaptive-words list
will be ignored. If you wish to add more words to be ignored, use the
gnus-ignored-adaptive-words list instead.
Some may feel that short words shouldn't count when doing adaptive
scoring. If so, you may set gnus-adaptive-word-length-limit to
an integer. Words shorter than this number will be ignored. This
variable defaults to nil.
When the scoring is done, gnus-adaptive-word-syntax-table is the
syntax table in effect. It is similar to the standard syntax table, but
it considers numbers to be non-word-constituent characters.
If gnus-adaptive-word-minimum is set to a number, the adaptive
word scoring process will never bring down the score of an article to
below this number. The default is nil.
If gnus-adaptive-word-no-group-words is set to t, gnus
won't adaptively word score any of the words in the group name. Useful
for groups like `comp.editors.emacs', where most of the subject
lines contain the word `emacs'.
After using this scheme for a while, it might be nice to write a
gnus-psychoanalyze-user command to go through the rules and see
what words you like and what words you don't like. Or perhaps not.
Note that the adaptive word scoring thing is highly experimental and is likely to change in the future. Initial impressions seem to indicate that it's totally useless as it stands. Some more work (involving more rigorous statistical methods) will have to be done to make this useful.
The score file where new score file entries will go is called the home score file. This is normally (and by default) the score file for the group itself. For instance, the home score file for `gnu.emacs.gnus' is gnu.emacs.gnus.SCORE.
However, this may not be what you want. It is often convenient to share a common home score file among many groups—all `emacs' groups could perhaps use the same home score file.
The variable that controls this is gnus-home-score-file. It can
be:
(regexp file-name). If the regexp matches the
group name, the file-name will be used as the home score file.
nil, the result will
be used as the home score file. The function will be called with the
name of the group as the parameter.
The list will be traversed from the beginning towards the end looking for matches.
So, if you want to use just a single score file, you could say:
(setq gnus-home-score-file
"my-total-score-file.SCORE")
If you want to use gnu.SCORE for all `gnu' groups and rec.SCORE for all `rec' groups (and so on), you can say:
(setq gnus-home-score-file
'gnus-hierarchial-home-score-file)
This is a ready-made function provided for your convenience. Other functions include
gnus-current-home-score-fileIf you want to have one score file for the `emacs' groups and another for the `comp' groups, while letting all other groups use their own home score files:
(setq gnus-home-score-file
;; All groups that match the regexp "\\.emacs"
'(("\\.emacs" "emacs.SCORE")
;; All the comp groups in one score file
("^comp" "comp.SCORE")))
gnus-home-adapt-file works exactly the same way as
gnus-home-score-file, but says what the home adaptive score file
is instead. All new adaptive file entries will go into the file
specified by this variable, and the same syntax is allowed.
In addition to using gnus-home-score-file and
gnus-home-adapt-file, you can also use group parameters
(see Group Parameters) and topic parameters (see Topic Parameters) to achieve much the same. Group and topic parameters take
precedence over this variable.
Gnus offers two commands for picking out the Message-ID header in
the current buffer. Gnus will then add a score rule that scores using
this Message-ID on the References header of other
articles. This will, in effect, increase the score of all articles that
respond to the article in the current buffer. Quite useful if you want
to easily note when people answer what you've said.
gnus-score-followup-articlegnus-score-followup-threadThese two functions are both primarily meant to be used in hooks like
message-sent-hook, like this:
(add-hook 'message-sent-hook 'gnus-score-followup-thread)
If you look closely at your own Message-ID, you'll notice that
the first two or three characters are always the same. Here's two of
mine:
<x6u3u47icf.fsf@eyesore.no>
<x6sp9o7ibw.fsf@eyesore.no>
So “my” ident on this machine is `x6'. This can be exploited—the following rule will raise the score on all followups to myself:
("references"
("<x6[0-9a-z]+\\.fsf\\(_-_\\)?@.*eyesore\\.no>"
1000 nil r))
Whether it's the first two or first three characters that are “yours” is system-dependent.
Gnus is quite fast when scoring the “traditional”
headers—`From', `Subject' and so on. However, scoring
other headers requires writing a head scoring rule, which means
that Gnus has to request every single article from the back end to find
matches. This takes a long time in big groups.
Now, there's not much you can do about this for news groups, but for
mail groups, you have greater control. In To From Newsgroups,
it's explained in greater detail what this mechanism does, but here's
a cookbook example for nnml on how to allow scoring on the
`To' and `Cc' headers.
Put the following in your ~/.gnus.el file.
(setq gnus-extra-headers '(To Cc Newsgroups Keywords)
nnmail-extra-headers gnus-extra-headers)
Restart Gnus and rebuild your nnml overview files with the
M-x nnml-generate-nov-databases command. This will take a long
time if you have much mail.
Now you can score on `To' and `Cc' as “extra headers” like so: I e s p To RET <your name> RET.
See? Simple.
Xref header.
("xref" (" talk.politics.misc:" -1000))
("xref"
("[^:\n]+:[0-9]+ +[^:\n]+:[0-9]+ +[^:\n]+:[0-9]+"
-1000 nil r))
Head, Body and All), you should choose one
and stick with it in each score file. If you use any two, each article
will be fetched twice. If you want to match a bit on the
Head and a bit on the Body, just use All for all
the matches.
((mark -100))
You may also consider doing something similar with expunge.
[^abcd]*, you may get unexpected results.
That will match newlines, which might lead to, well, The Unknown. Say
[^abcd\n]* instead.
If you want to keep just articles that have `Sex with Emacs' in the subject header, and expunge all other articles, you could put something like this in your score file:
(("subject"
("Sex with Emacs" 2))
(mark 1)
(expunge 1))
So, you raise all articles that match `Sex with Emacs' and mark the rest as read, and expunge them to boot.
Sure, other newsreaders have “global kill files”. These are usually nothing more than a single kill file that applies to all groups, stored in the user's home directory. Bah! Puny, weak newsreaders!
What I'm talking about here are Global Score Files. Score files from all over the world, from users everywhere, uniting all nations in one big, happy score file union! Ange-score! New and untested!
All you have to do to use other people's score files is to set the
gnus-global-score-files variable. One entry for each score file,
or each score file directory. Gnus will decide by itself what score
files are applicable to which group.
To use the score file /ftp@ftp.gnus.org:/pub/larsi/ding/score/soc.motss.SCORE and all score files in the /ftp@ftp.some-where:/pub/score directory, say this:
(setq gnus-global-score-files
'("/ftp@ftp.gnus.org:/pub/larsi/ding/score/soc.motss.SCORE"
"/ftp@ftp.some-where:/pub/score/"))
Simple, eh? Directory names must end with a `/'. These
directories are typically scanned only once during each Gnus session.
If you feel the need to manually re-scan the remote directories, you can
use the gnus-score-search-global-directories command.
Note that, at present, using this option will slow down group entry somewhat. (That is—a lot.)
If you want to start maintaining score files for other people to use, just put your score file up for anonymous ftp and announce it to the world. Become a retro-moderator! Participate in the retro-moderator wars sure to ensue, where retro-moderators battle it out for the sympathy of the people, luring them to use their score files on false premises! Yay! The net is saved!
Here are some tips for the would-be retro-moderator, off the top of my head:
Message-ID.
mark and expunge atoms to obliterate the nastiest
articles completely.
I wonder whether other newsreaders will support global score files in the future. Snicker. Yup, any day now, newsreaders like Blue Wave, xrn and 1stReader are bound to implement scoring. Should we start holding our breath yet?
Gnus still supports those pesky old kill files. In fact, the kill file entries can now be expiring, which is something I wrote before Daniel Quinlan thought of doing score files, so I've left the code in there.
In short, kill processing is a lot slower (and I do mean a lot) than score processing, so it might be a good idea to rewrite your kill files into score files.
Anyway, a kill file is a normal emacs-lisp file. You can put any
forms into this file, which means that you can use kill files as some
sort of primitive hook function to be run on group entry, even though
that isn't a very good idea.
Normal kill files look like this:
(gnus-kill "From" "Lars Ingebrigtsen")
(gnus-kill "Subject" "ding")
(gnus-expunge "X")
This will mark every article written by me as read, and remove the marked articles from the summary buffer. Very useful, you'll agree.
Other programs use a totally different kill file syntax. If Gnus
encounters what looks like a rn kill file, it will take a stab at
interpreting it.
Two summary functions for editing a gnus kill file:
gnus-summary-edit-local-kill).
gnus-summary-edit-global-kill).
Two group mode functions for editing the kill files:
gnus-group-edit-local-kill).
gnus-group-edit-global-kill).
Kill file variables:
gnus-kill-file-namegnus-kill-file-name variable.
The “global” kill file (not in the score file sense of “global”, of
course) is just called KILL.
gnus-kill-save-kill-filenil, Gnus will save the
kill file after processing, which is necessary if you use expiring
kills.
gnus-apply-kill-hook(gnus-apply-kill-file) by default. If you want to ignore the
kill file if you have a score file for the same group, you can set this
hook to (gnus-apply-kill-file-unless-scored). If you don't want
kill files to be processed, you should set this variable to nil.
gnus-kill-file-mode-hookIf you have loads of old kill files, you may want to convert them into score files. If they are “regular”, you can use the gnus-kill-to-score.el package; if not, you'll have to do it by hand.
The kill to score conversion package isn't included in Gnus by default. You can fetch it from http://www.stud.ifi.uio.no/~larsi/ding-various/gnus-kill-to-score.el.
If your old kill files are very complex—if they contain more
non-gnus-kill forms than not, you'll have to convert them by
hand. Or just let them be as they are. Gnus will still use them as
before.
Note: Unfortunately the GroupLens system seems to have shut down, so this section is mostly of historical interest.
GroupLens is a collaborative filtering system that helps you work together with other people to find the quality news articles out of the huge volume of news articles generated every day.
To accomplish this the GroupLens system combines your opinions about articles you have already read with the opinions of others who have done likewise and gives you a personalized prediction for each unread news article. Think of GroupLens as a matchmaker. GroupLens watches how you rate articles, and finds other people that rate articles the same way. Once it has found some people you agree with it tells you, in the form of a prediction, what they thought of the article. You can use this prediction to help you decide whether or not you want to read the article.
To use GroupLens you must register a pseudonym with your local Better Bit Bureau (BBB) is the only better bit in town at the moment.
Once you have registered you'll need to set a couple of variables.
gnus-use-grouplensnil value will make Gnus hook into
all the relevant GroupLens functions.
grouplens-pseudonymgrouplens-newsgroupsThat's the minimum of what you need to get up and running with GroupLens. Once you've registered, GroupLens will start giving you scores for articles based on the average of what other people think. But, to get the real benefit of GroupLens you need to start rating articles yourself. Then the scores GroupLens gives you will be personalized for you, based on how the people you usually agree with have already rated.
In GroupLens, an article is rated on a scale from 1 to 5, inclusive. Where 1 means something like this article is a waste of bandwidth and 5 means that the article was really good. The basic question to ask yourself is, “on a scale from 1 to 5 would I like to see more articles like this one?”
There are four ways to enter a rating for an article in GroupLens.
The next two commands, n and , take a numerical prefix to be the score of the article you're reading.
If you want to give the current article a score of 4 and then go to the next article, just type 4 n.
GroupLens makes a prediction for you about how much you will like a
news article. The predictions from GroupLens are on a scale from 1 to
5, where 1 is the worst and 5 is the best. You can use the predictions
from GroupLens in one of three ways controlled by the variable
gnus-grouplens-override-scoring.
There are three ways to display predictions in grouplens. You may
choose to have the GroupLens scores contribute to, or override the
regular Gnus scoring mechanism. override is the default; however, some
people prefer to see the Gnus scores plus the grouplens scores. To get
the separate scoring behavior you need to set
gnus-grouplens-override-scoring to 'separate. To have the
GroupLens predictions combined with the grouplens scores set it to
'override and to combine the scores set
gnus-grouplens-override-scoring to 'combine. When you use
the combine option you will also want to set the values for
grouplens-prediction-offset and
grouplens-score-scale-factor.
In either case, GroupLens gives you a few choices for how you would like
to see your predictions displayed. The display of predictions is
controlled by the grouplens-prediction-display variable.
The following are valid values for that variable.
prediction-spotconfidence-intervalprediction-barconfidence-barconfidence-spotprediction-numconfidence-plus-minusgnus-summary-grouplens-line-formatgrouplens-bbb-hostgrouplens-bbb-portgrouplens-score-offsetgrouplens-score-scale-factorScoring on Subjects and From headers is nice enough, but what if you're really interested in what a person has to say only when she's talking about a particular subject? Or what if you really don't want to read what person A has to say when she's following up to person B, but want to read what she says when she's following up to person C?
By using advanced scoring rules you may create arbitrarily complex scoring patterns.
Ordinary scoring rules have a string as the first element in the rule.
Advanced scoring rules have a list as the first element. The second
element is the score to be applied if the first element evaluated to a
non-nil value.
These lists may consist of three logical operators, one redirection operator, and various match operators.
Logical operators:
&andfalse, and then it'll stop. If all arguments
evaluate to true values, then this operator will return
true.
|ortrue. If no arguments are true,
then this operator will return false.
!not¬There is an indirection operator that will make its arguments
apply to the ancestors of the current article being scored. For
instance, 1- will make score rules apply to the parent of the
current article. 2- will make score rules apply to the
grandparent of the current article. Alternatively, you can write
^^, where the number of ^s (carets) says how far back into
the ancestry you want to go.
Finally, we have the match operators. These are the ones that do the real work. Match operators are header name strings followed by a match and a match type. A typical match operator looks like `("from" "Lars Ingebrigtsen" s)'. The header names are the same as when using simple scoring, and the match types are also the same.
Please note that the following examples are score file rules. To make a complete score file from them, surround them with another pair of parentheses.
Let's say you want to increase the score of articles written by Lars when he's talking about Gnus:
((&
("from" "Lars Ingebrigtsen")
("subject" "Gnus"))
1000)
Quite simple, huh?
When he writes long articles, he sometimes has something nice to say:
((&
("from" "Lars Ingebrigtsen")
(|
("subject" "Gnus")
("lines" 100 >)))
1000)
However, when he responds to things written by Reig Eigil Logge, you really don't want to read what he's written:
((&
("from" "Lars Ingebrigtsen")
(1- ("from" "Reig Eigil Logge")))
-100000)
Everybody that follows up Redmondo when he writes about disappearing socks should have their scores raised, but only when they talk about white socks. However, when Lars talks about socks, it's usually not very interesting:
((&
(1-
(&
("from" "redmondo@.*no" r)
("body" "disappearing.*socks" t)))
(! ("from" "Lars Ingebrigtsen"))
("body" "white.*socks"))
1000)
Suppose you're reading a high volume group and you're only interested in replies. The plan is to score down all articles that don't have subject that begin with "Re:", "Fw:" or "Fwd:" and then score up all parents of articles that have subjects that begin with reply marks.
((! ("subject" "re:\\|fwd?:" r))
-200)
((1- ("subject" "re:\\|fwd?:" r))
200)
The possibilities are endless.
The & and | logical operators do short-circuit logic.
That is, they stop processing their arguments when it's clear what the
result of the operation will be. For instance, if one of the arguments
of an & evaluates to false, there's no point in evaluating
the rest of the arguments. This means that you should put slow matches
(`body', `header') last and quick matches (`from',
`subject') first.
The indirection arguments (1- and so on) will make their
arguments work on previous generations of the thread. If you say
something like:
...
(1-
(1-
("from" "lars")))
...
Then that means “score on the from header of the grandparent of the current article”. An indirection is quite fast, but it's better to say:
(1-
(&
("from" "Lars")
("subject" "Gnus")))
than it is to say:
(&
(1- ("from" "Lars"))
(1- ("subject" "Gnus")))
You may find that your scores have a tendency to grow without bounds, especially if you're using adaptive scoring. If scores get too big, they lose all meaning—they simply max out and it's difficult to use them in any sensible way.
Gnus provides a mechanism for decaying scores to help with this problem.
When score files are loaded and gnus-decay-scores is
non-nil, Gnus will run the score files through the decaying
mechanism thereby lowering the scores of all non-permanent score rules.
The decay itself if performed by the gnus-decay-score-function
function, which is gnus-decay-score by default. Here's the
definition of that function:
(defun gnus-decay-score (score)
"Decay SCORE according to `gnus-score-decay-constant'
and `gnus-score-decay-scale'."
(let ((n (- score
(* (if (< score 0) -1 1)
(min (abs score)
(max gnus-score-decay-constant
(* (abs score)
gnus-score-decay-scale)))))))
(if (and (featurep 'xemacs)
;; XEmacs' floor can handle only the floating point
;; number below the half of the maximum integer.
(> (abs n) (lsh -1 -2)))
(string-to-number
(car (split-string (number-to-string n) "\\.")))
(floor n))))
gnus-score-decay-constant is 3 by default and
gnus-score-decay-scale is 0.05. This should cause the following:
If you don't like this decay function, write your own. It is called with the score to be decayed as its only parameter, and it should return the new score, which should be an integer.
Gnus will try to decay scores once a day. If you haven't run Gnus for four days, Gnus will decay the scores four times, for instance.
Many functions, among them functions for moving, decoding and saving articles, use what is known as the Process/Prefix convention.
This is a method for figuring out what articles the user wants the command to be performed on.
It goes like this:
If the numeric prefix is N, perform the operation on the next N articles, starting with the current one. If the numeric prefix is negative, perform the operation on the previous N articles, starting with the current one.
If transient-mark-mode in non-nil and the region is
active, all articles in the region will be worked upon.
If there is no numeric prefix, but some articles are marked with the process mark, perform the operation on the articles marked with the process mark.
If there is neither a numeric prefix nor any articles marked with the process mark, just perform the operation on the current article.
Quite simple, really, but it needs to be made clear so that surprises are avoided.
Commands that react to the process mark will push the current list of process marked articles onto a stack and will then clear all process marked articles. You can restore the previous configuration with the M P y command (see Setting Process Marks).
One thing that seems to shock & horrify lots of people is that, for
instance, 3 d does exactly the same as d d d.
Since each d (which marks the current article as read) by default
goes to the next unread article after marking, this means that 3 d
will mark the next three unread articles as read, no matter what the
summary buffer looks like. Set gnus-summary-goto-unread to
nil for a more straightforward action.
Many commands do not use the process/prefix convention. All commands that do explicitly say so in this manual. To apply the process/prefix convention to commands that do not use it, you can use the M-& command. For instance, to mark all the articles in the group as expirable, you could say M P b M-& E.
gnus-novice-usernil, you are either a newcomer to the
World of Usenet, or you are very cautious, which is a nice thing to be,
really. You will be given questions of the type “Are you sure you want
to do this?” before doing anything dangerous. This is t by
default.
gnus-expert-usernil, you will seldom be asked any
questions by Gnus. It will simply assume you know what you're doing, no
matter how strange.
gnus-interactive-catchupnil. It
is t by default.
gnus-interactive-exitt by
default.
Quite a lot of Emacs commands react to the (numeric) prefix. For
instance, C-u 4 C-f moves point four characters forward, and
C-u 9 0 0 I s s p adds a permanent Subject substring score
rule of 900 to the current article.
This is all nice and well, but what if you want to give a command some additional information? Well, what most commands do is interpret the “raw” prefix in some special way. C-u 0 C-x C-s means that one doesn't want a backup file to be created when saving the current buffer, for instance. But what if you want to save without making a backup file, and you want Emacs to flash lights and play a nice tune at the same time? You can't, and you're probably perfectly happy that way.
I'm not, so I've added a second prefix—the symbolic prefix. The
prefix key is M-i (gnus-symbolic-argument), and the next
character typed in is the value. You can stack as many M-i
prefixes as you want. M-i a C-M-u means “feed the C-M-u
command the symbolic prefix a”. M-i a M-i b C-M-u means
“feed the C-M-u command the symbolic prefixes a and
b”. You get the drift.
Typing in symbolic prefixes to commands that don't accept them doesn't hurt, but it doesn't do any good either. Currently not many Gnus functions make use of the symbolic prefix.
If you're interested in how Gnus implements this, see Extended Interactive.
Throughout this manual you've probably noticed lots of variables called
things like gnus-group-line-format and
gnus-summary-mode-line-format. These control how Gnus is to
output lines in the various buffers. There's quite a lot of them.
Fortunately, they all use the same syntax, so there's not that much to
be annoyed by.
Here's an example format spec (from the group buffer): `%M%S%5y: %(%g%)\n'. We see that it is indeed extremely ugly, and that there are lots of percentages everywhere.