This file documents Gnus, the GNU Emacs newsreader.

Copyright (C) 1995,96 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this manual provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved on all copies.

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The Gnus Newsreader
*******************

You can read news (and mail) from within Emacs by using Gnus.  The news can be gotten by any nefarious means you can think of---NNTP, local spool or your mbox file.  All at the same time, if you want to push your luck.

This manual corresponds to Gnus 5.4.40.

Starting Gnus
*************

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 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.

Finding the News
================

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 that are 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.

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 will try to use the machine that is 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.

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 backend to read your mail, you would typically set this variable to

     (setq gnus-secondary-select-methods '((nnmbox "")))

The First Time
==============

If no startup files exist, 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 here defined 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.

The Server is Down
==================

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.)

Slave Gnusae
============

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.)

Anyways, 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.

Fetching a Group
================

It it sometimes convenient to be able to just say ``I want to read this group and I don't care whether Gnus has been started or not''.  This is perhaps more useful for people who write code than for users, but the command gnus-fetch-group provides this functionality in any case. It takes the group name as a parameter.

New Groups
==========

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 t by default.  If you set this variable to always, then Gnus will query the backends for new groups even when you do the g command (see Scanning New Messages).

Checking New Groups
-------------------

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.

Subscription Methods
--------------------

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-zombies
     Make all new groups zombies.  This is the default.  You can browse the zombies later (with A z) and either kill them all off properly (with S z), or subscribe to them (with u).

gnus-subscribe-randomly
     Subscribe all new groups randomly.

gnus-subscribe-alphabetically
     Subscribe all new groups alphabetically.

gnus-subscribe-hierarchically
     Subscribe all new groups hierarchically.  The difference between this function and gnus-subscribe-alphabetically is slight. gnus-subscribe-alphabetically will subscribe new groups in a strictly alphabetical fashion, while this function will enter groups into it's 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-interactively
     Subscribe new groups interactively.  This means that Gnus will ask you about all new groups.

gnus-subscribe-killed
     Kill all new groups.

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 to gnus-subscribe-hierarchical-interactive.  This is an error.  This will not work.  This is ga-ga.  So don't do it.

Filtering New Groups
--------------------

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 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 backends (nnml, nnbabyl, nnfolder, nnmbox, and nnmh) 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.

Changing Servers
================

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.

Startup Files
=============

Now, you all know about the .newsrc file.  All subscription information is traditionally stored in this file.

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 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 making exit from Gnus faster. However, this will make it impossible to use other newsreaders than Gnus.  But hey, who would want to, right?

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.

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 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).

Auto Save
=========

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.

The Active File
===============

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 t 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.

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.

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.

Startup Variables
=================

gnus-load-hook
     A hook that is run while Gnus is being loaded.  Note that this hook will normally be run just once in each Emacs session, no matter how many times you start Gnus.

gnus-startup-hook
     A hook that is run after starting up Gnus successfully.

gnus-started-hook
     A hook that is run as the very last thing after starting up Gnus successfully.

gnus-check-bogus-newsgroups
     If non-nil, 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-message
     If non-nil, 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-message
     Message displayed by Gnus when no groups are available.

gnus-play-startup-jingle
     If non-nil, play the Gnus jingle at startup.

gnus-startup-jingle
     Jingle to be played if the above variable is non-nil.  The default is Tuxedomoon.Jingle4.au.

The Group Buffer
****************

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.

Group Buffer Format
===================

Group Line Specification
------------------------

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: %(%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.  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:

M
     An asterisk if the group only has marked articles.

S
     Whether the group is subscribed.

L
     Level of subscribedness.

N
     Number of unread articles.

I
     Number of dormant articles.

T
     Number of ticked articles.

R
     Number of read articles.

t
     Estimated total number of articles.  (This is really MAX-NUMBER minus MIN-NUMBER plus 1.)

y
     Number of unread, unticked, non-dormant articles.

i
     Number of ticked and dormant articles.

g
     Full group name.

G
     Group name.

D
     Newsgroup description.

o
     m if moderated.

O
     (m) if moderated.

s
     Select method.

n
     Select from where.

z
     A string that looks like <%s:%n> if a foreign select method is used.

P
     Indentation based on the level of the topic (see Group Topics).

c
     Short (collapsed) group name.  The 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.emacs.gnus.

m
     % (gnus-new-mail-mark) if there has arrived new mail to the group lately.

d
     A string that says when you last read the group (see Group Timestamp).

u
     User defined specifier.  The next character in the format string should be a letter.  GNUS will call the function 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.

Group Modeline Specification
----------------------------

The mode line can be changed by setting gnus-group-mode-line-format (see Formatting Variables).  It doesn't understand that many format specifiers:

S
     The native news server.

M
     The native select method.

Group Highlighting
------------------

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:

     (setq gnus-group-highlight
           `(((> unread 200) .
              ,(custom-face-lookup "Red" nil nil t nil nil))
             ((and (< level 3) (zerop unread)) .
              ,(custom-face-lookup "SeaGreen" nil nil t nil nil))
             ((< level 3) .
              ,(custom-face-lookup "SpringGreen" nil nil t nil nil))
             ((zerop unread) .
              ,(custom-face-lookup "SteelBlue" nil nil t nil nil))
             (t .
              ,(custom-face-lookup "SkyBlue" nil nil t nil nil))))

Variables that are dynamically bound when the forms are evaluated include:

group
     The group name.

unread
     The number of unread articles in the group.

method
     The select method.

mailp
     Whether the group is a mail group.

level
     The level of the group.

score
     The score of the group.

ticked
     The number of ticked articles in the group.

total
     The total number of articles in the group.  Or rather, MAX-NUMBER minus MIN-NUMBER.

topic
     When using the topic minor mode, this variable is bound to the current topic being inserted.

When 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.

Group Maneuvering
=================

All movement commands understand the numeric prefix and will behave as expected, hopefully.

n
     Go to the next group that has unread articles (gnus-group-next-unread-group).

p
DEL
     Go to the previous group that has unread articles (gnus-group-prev-unread-group).

N
     Go to the next group (gnus-group-next-group).

P
     Go to the previous group (gnus-group-prev-group).

M-p
     Go to the next unread group on the same (or lower) level (gnus-group-next-unread-group-same-level).

M-n
     Go to the previous unread group on the same (or lower) level (gnus-group-prev-unread-group-same-level).

Three commands for jumping to groups:

j
     Jump to a group (and make it visible if it isn't already) (gnus-group-jump-to-group).  Killed groups can be jumped to, just like living groups.

,
     Jump to the unread group with the lowest level (gnus-group-best-unread-group).

.
     Jump to the first group with unread articles (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.

Selecting a Group
=================

SPACE
     Select the current group, switch to the summary buffer and display the first unread article (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.

RET
     Select the current group and switch to the summary buffer (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.

M-RET
     This does the same as the command above, but tries to do it with the minimum amount of fuzz (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. This might be useful if you want to toggle threading before entering the group.

M-SPACE
     This is yet one more command that does the same as the RET command, but this one does it without expunging and hiding dormants (gnus-group-visible-select-group).

M-C-RET
     Finally, this command selects the current group ephemerally without doing any processing of its contents (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.  This is 200 by default.  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-auto-select-first control whether any articles are selected automatically when entering a group with the SPACE command.

nil
     Don't select any articles when entering the group.  Just display the full summary buffer.

t
     Select the first unread article when entering the group.

best
     Select the most high-scored article in the group when entering the group.

If you want to prevent automatic selection in some group (say, in a binary group with Huge articles) you can set this variable to nil in gnus-select-group-hook, which is called when a group is selected.

Subscription Commands
=====================

S t
u
     Toggle subscription to the current group (gnus-group-unsubscribe-current-group).

S s
U
     Prompt for a group to subscribe, and then subscribe it.  If it was subscribed already, unsubscribe it instead (gnus-group-unsubscribe-group).

S k
C-k
     Kill the current group (gnus-group-kill-group).

S y
C-y
     Yank the last killed group (gnus-group-yank-group).

C-x C-t
     Transpose two groups (gnus-group-transpose-groups).  This isn't really a subscription command, but you can use it instead of a kill-and-yank sequence sometimes.

S w
C-w
     Kill all groups in the region (gnus-group-kill-region).

S z
     Kill all zombie groups (gnus-group-kill-all-zombies).

S C-k
     Kill all groups on a certain level (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.

Group Data
==========

c
     Mark all unticked articles in this group as read (gnus-group-catchup-current). gnus-group-catchup-group-hook is called when catching up a group from the group buffer.

C
     Mark all articles in this group, even the ticked ones, as read (gnus-group-catchup-current-all).

M-c
     Clear the data from the current group---nix out marks and the list of read articles (gnus-group-clear-data).

M-x gnus-group-clear-data-on-native-groups
     If you have switched from one NNTP server to another, all your marks and read ranges have become worthless.  You can use this command to clear out all data that you have on your native groups.  Use with caution.

Group Levels
============

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.

S l
     Set the level of the current group.  If a numeric prefix is given, the next N groups will have their levels set.  The user will be prompted for a level.

Gnus considers groups on between levels 1 and 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 (default 9), completely dead.  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).

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 legal ranges.

If gnus-keep-same-level is non-nil, some movement commands will only move to groups that are 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.

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 groups that are 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.

Group Score
===========

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 assign a score to each group.  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.

Marking Groups
==============

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.

#
M m
     Set the mark on the current group (gnus-group-mark-group).

M-#
M u
     Remove the mark from the current group (gnus-group-unmark-group).

M U
     Remove the mark from all groups (gnus-group-unmark-all-groups).

M w
     Mark all groups between point and mark (gnus-group-mark-region).

M b
     Mark all groups in the buffer (gnus-group-mark-buffer).

M r
     Mark all groups that match some regular expression (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.

Foreign Groups
==============

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.

G m
     Make a new group (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.

G r
     Rename the current group to something else (gnus-group-rename-group).  This is legal only on some groups---mail groups mostly.  This command might very well be quite slow on some backends.

G c
     Customize the group parameters (gnus-group-customize).

G e
     Enter a buffer where you can edit the select method of the current group (gnus-group-edit-group-method).

G p
     Enter a buffer where you can edit the group parameters (gnus-group-edit-group-parameters).

G E
     Enter a buffer where you can edit the group info (gnus-group-edit-group).

G d
     Make a directory group (see Directory Groups).  You will be prompted for a directory name (gnus-group-make-directory-group).

G h
     Make the Gnus help group (gnus-group-make-help-group).

G a
     Make a Gnus archive 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.

G k
     Make a kiboze group.  You will be prompted for a name, for a regexp to match groups to be ``included'' in the kiboze group, and a series of strings to match on headers (gnus-group-make-kiboze-group). See Kibozed Groups.

G D
     Read an arbitrary directory as if with were a newsgroup with the nneething backend (gnus-group-enter-directory). See Anything Groups.

G f
     Make a group based on some file or other (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 babyl, mbox, digest, mmdf, news, rnews, clari-briefs, rfc934, rfc822-forward, and forward.  If you run this command without a prefix, Gnus will guess at the file type. See Document Groups.

G w
     Make an ephemeral group based on a web search (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.  Legal search engine types include dejanews, altavista and reference. See Web Searches.

G DEL
     This function will delete the current group (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.

G V
     Make a new, fresh, empty nnvirtual group (gnus-group-make-empty-virtual).  See Virtual Groups.

G v
     Add the current group to an 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.

Group Parameters
================

The group parameters store information local to a particular group:

to-address
     If the group parameter list contains an element that looks like (to-address .  "some@where.com"), that address will be used by the backend when doing followups and posts.  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.

to-list
     If the group parameter list has an element that looks like (to-list . "some@where.com"), that address will be used when doing a a in any group.  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 don't have a to-list group parameter, one will be added automatically upon sending the message.

broken-reply-to
     Elements like (broken-reply-to . t) signals that Reply-To headers in this group are to be ignored.  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.  This is broken behavior.  So there!

to-group
     Elements like (to-group . "some.group.name") means that all posts in that group will be sent to some.group.name.

newsgroup
     If this symbol is present 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
     If this symbol is present in the group parameter list and set to t, new composed messages will be Gcc'd to the current group. If it is present and set to none, no Gcc: header will be generated, if it is present and a string, this string will be inserted literally as a gcc header (this symbol takes precedence over any default Gcc rules as described later).

auto-expire
     If the group parameter has an element that looks like (auto-expire . t), , all articles that are read will be marked as expirable.  For an alternative approach, see Expiring Mail.

total-expire
     If the group parameter has an element that looks like (total-expire . t), all read articles will be put through the expiry process, even if they are not marked as expirable.  Use with caution.

expiry-wait
     If the group parameter has an element that looks like (expiry-wait . 10), this value will override any nnmail-expiry-wait and nnmail-expiry-wait-function when expiring expirable messages. The value can either be a number of days (not necessarily an integer) or the symbols never or immediate.

score-file
     Elements that look like (score-file . "file") will make file into the current score file for the group in question.  This means that all score commands you issue will end up in that file.

adapt-file
     Elements that look like (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-address
     When unsubscribing to a mailing list you should never send the unsubscription notice to the mailing list itself.  Instead, you'd send messages to the administrative address.  This parameter allows you to put the admin address somewhere convenient.

display
     Elements that look like (display . MODE) says which articles to display on entering the group.  Legal values are:

     all
          Display all articles, both read and unread.

     default
          Display the default visible articles, which normally includes unread and ticked articles.

comment
     Elements that look like (comment . "This is a comment") are arbitrary comments on the group.  They are currently ignored by Gnus, but provide a place for you to store information on particular groups.

(VARIABLE FORM)
     You can use the group parameters to set variables local to the group you are entering.  If you want to turn threading off in news.answers, you could put (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.

     This can also be used as a group-specific hook function, if you'd like. 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 result of the (ding) form, but who cares?

Use the G p command to edit group parameters of a group.

Also see Topic Parameters.

Here's an example group parameter list:

     ((to-address . "ding@gnus.org")
      (auto-expiry . t))

Listing Groups
==============

These commands all list various slices of the groups that are available.

l
A s
     List all groups that have unread articles (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).

L
A u
     List all groups, whether they have unread articles or not (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).

A l
     List all unread groups on a specific level (gnus-group-list-level).  If given a prefix, also list the groups with no unread articles.

A k
     List all killed groups (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.

A z
     List all zombie groups (gnus-group-list-zombies).

A m
     List all unread, subscribed groups with names that match a regexp (gnus-group-list-matching).

A M
     List groups that match a regexp (gnus-group-list-all-matching).

A A
     List absolutely all groups that are in the active file(s) of the server(s) you are connected to (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 group that don't exist (yet)---these will be listed as if they are killed groups. Take the output with some grains of salt.

A a
     List all groups that have names that match a regexp (gnus-group-apropos).

A d
     List all groups that have names or descriptions that match a regexp (gnus-group-description-apropos).

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.

Sorting Groups
==============

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-alphabet
     Sort the group names alphabetically.  This is the default.

gnus-group-sort-by-real-name
     Sort the group alphabetically on the real (unprefixed) group names.

gnus-group-sort-by-level
     Sort by group level.

gnus-group-sort-by-score
     Sort by group score.

gnus-group-sort-by-rank
     Sort by group score and then the group level.  The level and the score are, when taken together, the group's rank.

gnus-group-sort-by-unread
     Sort by number of unread articles.

gnus-group-sort-by-method
     Sort alphabetically on the select method.

gnus-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:

G S a
     Sort the group buffer alphabetically by group name (gnus-group-sort-groups-by-alphabet).

G S u
     Sort the group buffer by the number of unread articles (gnus-group-sort-groups-by-unread).

G S l
     Sort the group buffer by group level (gnus-group-sort-groups-by-level).

G S v
     Sort the group buffer by group score (gnus-group-sort-groups-by-score).

G S r
     Sort the group buffer by group rank (gnus-group-sort-groups-by-rank).

G S m
     Sort the group buffer alphabetically by backend name (gnus-group-sort-groups-by-method).

When given a prefix, all these commands will sort in reverse order.

You can also sort a subset of the groups:

G P a
     Sort the process/prefixed groups in the group buffer alphabetically by group name (gnus-group-sort-selected-groups-by-alphabet).

G P u
     Sort the process/prefixed groups in the group buffer by the number of unread articles (gnus-group-sort-selected-groups-by-unread).

G P l
     Sort the process/prefixed groups in the group buffer by group level (gnus-group-sort-selected-groups-by-level).

G P v
     Sort the process/prefixed groups in the group buffer by group score (gnus-group-sort-selected-groups-by-score).

G P r
     Sort the process/prefixed groups in the group buffer by group rank (gnus-group-sort-selected-groups-by-rank).

G P m
     Sort the process/prefixed groups in the group buffer alphabetically by backend name (gnus-group-sort-selected-groups-by-method).

Group Maintenance
=================

b
     Find bogus groups and delete them (gnus-group-check-bogus-groups).

F
     Find new groups and process them (gnus-find-new-newsgroups).  If given a prefix, use the ask-server method to query the server for new groups.

C-c C-x
     Run all expirable articles in the current group through the expiry process (if any) (gnus-group-expire-articles).

C-c M-C-x
     Run all articles in all groups through the expiry process (gnus-group-expire-all-groups).

Browse Foreign Server
=====================

B
     You will be queried for a select method and a server name.  Gnus will then attempt to contact this server and let you browse the groups there (gnus-group-browse-foreign-server).

A new buffer with a list of available groups will appear.  This buffer will be 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:

n
     Go to the next group (gnus-group-next-group).

p
     Go to the previous group (gnus-group-prev-group).

SPACE
     Enter the current group and display the first article (gnus-browse-read-group).

RET
     Enter the current group (gnus-browse-select-group).

u
     Unsubscribe to the current group, or, as will be the case here, subscribe to it (gnus-browse-unsubscribe-current-group).

l
q
     Exit browse mode (gnus-browse-exit).

?
     Describe browse mode briefly (well, there's not much to describe, is there) (gnus-browse-describe-briefly).

Exiting Gnus
============

Yes, Gnus is ex(c)iting.

z
     Suspend Gnus (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?

q
     Quit Gnus (gnus-group-exit).

Q
     Quit Gnus without saving the .newsrc files (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.

If you wish to completely unload Gnus and all its adherents, you can use the gnus-unload command.  This command is also very handy when trying to customize meta-variables.

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.

Group Topics
============

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:

     (add-hook 'gnus-group-mode-hook 'gnus-topic-mode)

Topic Variables
---------------

Now, if you select a topic, if will fold/unfold that topic, which is really neat, I think.

The topic lines themselves are created according to the gnus-topic-line-format variable (see Formatting Variables). Legal elements are:

i
     Indentation.

n
     Topic name.

v
     Visibility.

l
     Level.

g
     Number of groups in the topic.

a
     Number of unread articles in the topic.

A
     Number of unread articles in the topic and all its subtopics.

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.

Topic Commands
--------------

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.

T n
     Prompt for a new topic name and create it (gnus-topic-create-topic).

T m
     Move the current group to some other topic (gnus-topic-move-group).  This command uses the process/prefix convention (see Process/Prefix).

T c
     Copy the current group to some other topic (gnus-topic-copy-group).  This command uses the process/prefix convention (see Process/Prefix).

T D
     Remove a group from the current topic (gnus-topic-remove-group). This command uses the process/prefix convention (see Process/Prefix).

T M
     Move all groups that match some regular expression to a topic (gnus-topic-move-matching).

T C
     Copy all groups that match some regular expression to a topic (gnus-topic-copy-matching).

T #
     Mark all groups in the current topic with the process mark (gnus-topic-mark-topic).

T M-#
     Remove the process mark from all groups in the current topic (gnus-topic-unmark-topic).

RET
SPACE
     Either select a group or fold a topic (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.

T TAB
     ``Indent'' the current topic so that it becomes a sub-topic of the previous topic (gnus-topic-indent).  If given a prefix, ``un-indent'' the topic instead.

C-k
     Kill a group or topic (gnus-topic-kill-group).  All groups in the topic will be removed along with the topic.

C-y
     Yank the previously killed group or topic (gnus-topic-yank-group).  Note that all topics will be yanked before all groups.

T r
     Rename a topic (gnus-topic-rename).

T DEL
     Delete an empty topic (gnus-topic-delete).

A T
     List all groups that Gnus knows about in a topics-ified way (gnus-topic-list-active).

G p
     Edit the topic parameters (gnus-topic-edit-parameters). See Topic Parameters.

Topic Sorting
-------------

You can sort the groups in each topic individually with the following commands:

T S a
     Sort the current topic alphabetically by group name (gnus-topic-sort-groups-by-alphabet).

T S u
     Sort the current topic by the number of unread articles (gnus-topic-sort-groups-by-unread).

T S l
     Sort the current topic by group level (gnus-topic-sort-groups-by-level).

T S v
     Sort the current topic by group score (gnus-topic-sort-groups-by-score).

T S r
     Sort the current topic by group rank (gnus-topic-sort-groups-by-rank).

T S m
     Sort the current topic alphabetically by backend name (gnus-topic-sort-groups-by-method).

See Sorting Groups for more information about group sorting.

Topic Topology
--------------

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.

Topic Parameters
----------------

All groups in a topic will inherit group parameters from the parent (and ancestor) topic parameters.  All legal group parameters are legal topic parameters (see Group Parameters).

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.

Misc Group Stuff
================

^
     Enter the server buffer (gnus-group-enter-server-mode). See The Server Buffer.

a
     Post an article to a group (gnus-group-post-news).  The current group name will be used as the default.

m
     Mail a message somewhere (gnus-group-mail).

Variables for the group buffer:

gnus-group-mode-hook
     gnus-group-mode-hook is called after the group buffer has been created.

gnus-group-prepare-hook
     gnus-group-prepare-hook is called after the group buffer is generated.  It may be used to modify the buffer in some strange, unnatural way.

gnus-permanently-visible-groups
     Groups matching this regexp will always be listed in the group buffer, whether they are empty or not.

Scanning New Messages
---------------------

g
     Check the server(s) for new articles.  If the numerical prefix is used, this command will check only groups of level ARG and lower (gnus-group-get-new-news).  If given a non-numerical prefix, this command will force a total rereading of the active file(s) from the backend(s).

M-g
     Check whether new articles have arrived in the current group (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.

C-c M-g
     Activate absolutely all groups (gnus-activate-all-groups).

R
     Restart Gnus (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.

Group Information
-----------------

H f
     Try to fetch the FAQ for the current group (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.

H d
C-c C-d
     Describe the current group (gnus-group-describe-group).  If given a prefix, force Gnus to re-read the description from the server.

M-d
     Describe all groups (gnus-group-describe-all-groups).  If given a prefix, force Gnus to re-read the description file from the server.

V
     Display current Gnus version numbers (gnus-version).

?
     Give a very short help message (gnus-group-describe-briefly).

C-c C-i
     Go to the Gnus info node (gnus-info-find-node).

Group Timestamp
---------------

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")

File Commands
-------------

r
     Re-read the init file (gnus-init-file, which defaults to ~/.gnus) (gnus-group-read-init-file).

s
     Save the .newsrc.eld file (and .newsrc if wanted) (gnus-group-save-newsrc).  If given a prefix, force saving the file(s) whether Gnus thinks it is necessary or not.

The Summary Buffer
******************

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.

Summary Buffer Format
=====================

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 function 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.

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.

Summary Buffer Lines
--------------------

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 a a normal format string, with some extensions (see Formatting Variables).

The default string is %U%R%z%I%(%[%4L: %-20,20n%]%) %s\n.

The following format specification characters are understood:

N
     Article number.

S
     Subject string.

s
     Subject if the article is the root or the previous article had a different subject, gnus-summary-same-subject otherwise. (gnus-summary-same-subject defaults to.)

F
     Full From header.

n
     The name (from the From header).

a
     The name (from the 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.

A
     The address (from the From header).  This works the same way as the a spec.

L
     Number of lines in the article.

c
     Number of characters in the article.

I
     Indentation based on thread level (see Customizing Threading).

T
     Nothing if the article is a root and lots of spaces if it isn't (it pushes everything after it off the screen).

[
     Opening bracket, which is normally [, but can also be < for adopted articles (see Customizing Threading).

]
     Closing bracket, which is normally ], but can also be > for adopted articles.

>
     One space for each thread level.

<
     Twenty minus thread level spaces.

U
     Unread.

R
     Replied.

i
     Score as a number.

z
     Zcore, + if above the default level and - if below the default level.  If the difference between gnus-summary-default-level and the score is less than gnus-summary-zcore-fuzz, this spec will not be used.

V
     Total thread score.

x
     Xref.

D
     Date.

d
     The Date in DD-MMM format.

o
     The Date in YYYYMMDDTHHMMSS format.

M
     Message-ID.

r
     References.

t
     Number of articles in the current sub-thread.  Using this spec will slow down summary buffer generation somewhat.

e
     An = (gnus-not-empty-thread-mark) will be displayed if the article has any children.

P
     The line number.

u
     User defined specifier.  The next character in the format string should be a letter.  GNUS will call the function 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.

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 illegal 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.

Summary Buffer Mode Line
------------------------

You can also change the format of the summary mode bar.  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:

G
     Group name.

p
     Unprefixed group name.

A
     Current article number.

V
     Gnus version.

U
     Number of unread articles in this group.

e
     Number of unselected articles in this group.

Z
     A string with the number of unread and unselected articles represented either as <%U(+%e) more> if there are both unread and unselected articles, and just as <%U more> if there are just unread articles and no unselected ones.

g
     Shortish group name.  For instance, rec.arts.anime will be shortened to r.a.anime.

S
     Subject of the current article.

u
     User-defined spec.

s
     Name of the current score file.

d
     Number of dormant articles.

t
     Number of ticked articles.

r
     Number of articles that have been marked as read in this session.

E
     Number of articles expunged by the score files.

Summary Highlighting
--------------------

gnus-visual-mark-article-hook
     This hook is run after selecting an article.  It is meant to be used for highlighting the article in some way.  It is not run if gnus-visual is nil.

gnus-summary-update-hook
     This hook is called when a summary line is changed.  It is not run if gnus-visual is nil.

gnus-summary-selected-face
     This is the face (or font as some people call it) that is used to highlight the current article in the summary buffer.

gnus-summary-highlight
     Summary lines are highlighted according to this variable, which is a list where the elements are on the format (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.

Summary Maneuvering
===================

All the straight movement commands understand the numeric prefix and behave pretty much as you'd expect.

None of these commands select articles.

G M-n
M-n
     Go to the next summary line of an unread article (gnus-summary-next-unread-subject).

G M-p
M-p
     Go to the previous summary line of an unread article (gnus-summary-prev-unread-subject).

G j
j
     Ask for an article number and then go to that article (gnus-summary-goto-article).

G g
     Ask for an article number and then go the summary line of that article without displaying the article (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-next
     If you issue one of the movement commands (like n) and there are no more unread articles after the current one, Gnus will offer to go to the next group.  If this variable is t 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, no matter whether it has any unread articles or not.  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-same
     If non-nil, 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).)  This variable is not particularly useful if you use a threaded display.

gnus-summary-check-current
     If non-nil, 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-summary
     If non-nil, 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.

Choosing Articles
=================

Choosing Commands
-----------------

None of the following movement commands understand the numeric prefix, and they all select and display an article.

SPACE
     Select the current article, or, if that one's read already, the next unread article (gnus-summary-next-page).

G n
n
     Go to next unread article (gnus-summary-next-unread-article).

G p
p
     Go to previous unread article (gnus-summary-prev-unread-article).

G N
N
     Go to the next article (gnus-summary-next-article).

G P
P
     Go to the previous article (gnus-summary-prev-article).

G C-n
     Go to the next article with the same subject (gnus-summary-next-same-subject).

G C-p
     Go to the previous article with the same subject (gnus-summary-prev-same-subject).

G f
.
     Go to the first unread article (gnus-summary-first-unread-article).

G b
,
     Go to the article with the highest score (gnus-summary-best-unread-article).

G l
l
     Go to the previous article read (gnus-summary-goto-last-article).

G p
     Pop an article off the summary history and go to this 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.

Choosing Variables
------------------

Some variables that are relevant for moving and selecting articles:

gnus-auto-extend-newsgroup
     All the movement commands will try to go to the previous (or next) article, even if that article isn't displayed in the Summary buffer if this variable is non-nil.  Gnus will then fetch the article from the server and display it in the article buffer.

gnus-select-article-hook
     This hook is called whenever an article is selected.  By default it exposes any threads hidden under the selected article.

gnus-mark-article-hook
     This hook is called whenever an article is selected.  It is intended to be used for marking articles as read.  The default value is gnus-summary-mark-read-and-unread-as-read, and will change the mark of almost any article you read to gnus-unread-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.

Scrolling the Article
=====================

SPACE
     Pressing SPACE will scroll the current article forward one page, or, if you have come to the end of the current article, will choose the next article (gnus-summary-next-page).

DEL
     Scroll the current article back one page (gnus-summary-prev-page).

RET
     Scroll the current article one line forward (gnus-summary-scroll-up).

A g
g
     (Re)fetch the current article (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.

A <
<
     Scroll to the beginning of the article (gnus-summary-beginning-of-article).

A >
>
     Scroll to the end of the article (gnus-summary-end-of-article).

A s
s
     Perform an isearch in the article buffer (gnus-summary-isearch-article).

Reply, Followup and Post
========================

Summary Mail Commands
---------------------

Commands for composing a mail message:

S r
r
     Mail a reply to the author of the current article (gnus-summary-reply).

S R
R
     Mail a reply to the author of the current article and include the original message (gnus-summary-reply-with-original).  This command uses the process/prefix convention.

S w
     Mail a wide reply to the author of the current article (gnus-summary-wide-reply).

S W
     Mail a wide reply to the current article and include the original message (gnus-summary-reply-with-original).  This command uses the process/prefix convention.

S o m
     Forward the current article to some other person (gnus-summary-mail-forward).  If given a prefix, include the full headers of the forwarded article.

S m
m
     Send a mail to some other person (gnus-summary-mail-other-window).

S D b
     If you have sent a mail, but the mail was bounced back to you for some reason (wrong address, transient failure), you can use this command to resend that bounced mail (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.

S D r
     Not to be confused with the previous command, 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).

S O m
     Digest the current series and forward the result using mail (gnus-uu-digest-mail-forward).  This command uses the process/prefix convention (see Process/Prefix).

S M-c
     Send a complaint about excessive crossposting to the author of the current article (gnus-summary-mail-crosspost-complaint).

     This command is provided as a way to fight back agains 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.

Summary Post Commands
---------------------

Commands for posting a news article:

S p
a
     Post an article to the current group (gnus-summary-post-news).

S f
f
     Post a followup to the current article (gnus-summary-followup).

S F
F
     Post a followup to the current article and include the original message (gnus-summary-followup-with-original).   This command uses the process/prefix convention.

S n
     Post a followup to the current article via news, even if you got the message through mail (gnus-summary-followup-to-mail).

S n
     Post a followup to the current article via news, even if you got the message through mail and include the original message (gnus-summary-followup-to-mail-with-original).  This command uses the process/prefix convention.

S o p
     Forward the current article to a newsgroup (gnus-summary-post-forward).  If given a prefix, include the full headers of the forwarded article.

S O p
     Digest the current series and forward the result to a newsgroup (gnus-uu-digest-mail-forward).

S u
     Uuencode a file, split it into parts, and post it as a series (gnus-uu-post-news). (see Uuencoding and Posting).

Canceling Articles
==================

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.

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.

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'.

Marking Articles
================

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.

There's a plethora of commands for manipulating these marks:

Unread Articles
---------------

The following marks mark articles as (kinda) unread, in one form or other.

!
     Marked as ticked (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, so if you want to keep an article forever, you'll have to make it persistent (see Persistent Articles).

?
     Marked as dormant (gnus-dormant-mark).

     Dormant articles will only appear in the summary buffer if there are followups to it.

SPACE
     Markes as unread (gnus-unread-mark).

     Unread articles are articles that haven't been read at all yet.

Read Articles
-------------

All the following marks mark articles as read.

r
     These are articles that the user has marked as read with the d command manually, more or less (gnus-del-mark).

R
     Articles that have actually been read (gnus-read-mark).

O
     Articles that were marked as read in previous sessions and are now old (gnus-ancient-mark).

K
     Marked as killed (gnus-killed-mark).

X
     Marked as killed by kill files (gnus-kill-file-mark).

Y
     Marked as read by having a too low score (gnus-low-score-mark).

C
     Marked as read by a catchup (gnus-catchup-mark).

G
     Canceled article (gnus-canceled-mark)

F
     SOUPed article (gnus-souped-mark).  See SOUP.

Q
     Sparsely reffed article (gnus-sparse-mark).  See Customizing Threading.

M
     Article marked as read by duplicate suppression (gnus-duplicated-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:

E
     Marked as expirable (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 the expiring of news articles, but in mail groups, for instance, articles that are marked as expirable can be deleted by Gnus at any time.

Other Marks
-----------

There are some marks that have nothing to do with whether the article is read or not.

  * You can set a bookmark in the current article.  Say you are reading a long thesis on cats' urinary tracts, and have to go home for dinner before you've finished reading the thesis.  You can then set a bookmark in the article, and Gnus will jump to this bookmark the next time it encounters the article.  See Setting Marks

  * All articles that you have replied to or made a followup to (i.e., have answered) will be marked with an A in the second column (gnus-replied-mark).

  * Articles that are stored in the article cache will be marked with an * in the second column (gnus-cached-mark).

  * Articles that are ``saved'' (in some manner or other; not necessarily religiously) are marked with an S in the second column (gnus-saved-mark.

  * It the %e spec is used, the presence of threads or not will be marked with gnus-not-empty-thread-mark and gnus-empty-thread-mark in the third column, respectively.

  * Finally we have the process mark (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.

Setting Marks
-------------

All the marking commands understand the numeric prefix.

M t
!
     Tick the current article (gnus-summary-tick-article-forward).

M ?
?
     Mark the current article as dormant (gnus-summary-mark-as-dormant).

M d
d
     Mark the current article as read (gnus-summary-mark-as-read-forward).

D
     Mark the current article as read and move point to the previous line (gnus-summary-mark-as-read-backward).

M k
k
     Mark all articles that have the same subject as the current one as read, and then select the next unread article (gnus-summary-kill-same-subject-and-select).

M K
C-k
     Mark all articles that have the same subject as the current one as read (gnus-summary-kill-same-subject).

M C
     Mark all unread articles as read (gnus-summary-catchup).

M C-c
     Mark all articles in the group as read---even the ticked and dormant articles (gnus-summary-catchup-all).

M H
     Catchup the current group to point (gnus-summary-catchup-to-here).

C-w
     Mark all articles between point and mark as read (gnus-summary-mark-region-as-read).

M V k
     Kill all articles with scores below the default score (or below the numeric prefix) (gnus-summary-kill-below).

M c
M-u
     Clear all readedness-marks from the current article (gnus-summary-clear-mark-forward).

M e
E
     Mark the current article as expirable (gnus-summary-mark-as-expirable).

M b
     Set a bookmark in the current article (gnus-summary-set-bookmark).

M B
     Remove the bookmark from the current article (gnus-summary-remove-bookmark).

M V c
     Clear all marks from articles with scores over the default score (or over the numeric prefix) (gnus-summary-clear-above).

M V u
     Tick all articles with scores over the default score (or over the numeric prefix) (gnus-summary-tick-above).

M V m
     Prompt for a mark, and mark all articles with scores over the default score (or over the numeric prefix) with this mark (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.

Setting Process Marks
---------------------

M P p
#
     Mark the current article with the process mark (gnus-summary-mark-as-processable).

M P u
M-#
     Remove the process mark, if any, from the current article (gnus-summary-unmark-as-processable).

M P U
     Remove the process mark from all articles (gnus-summary-unmark-all-processable).

M P i
     Invert the list of process marked articles (gnus-uu-invert-processable).

M P R
     Mark articles by a regular expression (gnus-uu-mark-by-regexp).

M P r
     Mark articles in region (gnus-uu-mark-region).

M P t
     Mark all articles in the current (sub)thread (gnus-uu-mark-thread).

M P T
     Unmark all articles in the current (sub)thread (gnus-uu-unmark-thread).

M P v
     Mark all articles that have a score above the prefix argument (gnus-uu-mark-over).

M P s
     Mark all articles in the current series (gnus-uu-mark-series).

M P S
     Mark all series that have already had some articles marked (gnus-uu-mark-sparse).

M P a
     Mark all articles in series order (gnus-uu-mark-series).

M P b
     Mark all articles in the buffer in the order they appear (gnus-uu-mark-buffer).

M P k
     Push the current process mark set onto the stack and unmark all articles (gnus-summary-kill-process-mark).

M P y
     Pop the previous process mark set from the stack and restore it (gnus-summary-yank-process-mark).

M P w
     Push the current process mark set onto the stack (gnus-summary-save-process-mark).

Limiting
========

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.

/ /
/ s
     Limit the summary buffer to articles that match some subject (gnus-summary-limit-to-subject).

/ a
     Limit the summary buffer to articles that match some author (gnus-summary-limit-to-author).

/ u
x
     Limit the summary buffer to articles that are not marked as read (gnus-summary-limit-to-unread).  If given a prefix, limit the buffer to articles that are strictly unread.  This means that ticked and dormant articles will also be excluded.

/ m
     Ask for a mark and then limit to all articles that have not been marked with that mark (gnus-summary-limit-to-marks).

/ t
     Ask for a number and then limit the summary buffer to articles that are older than (or equal to) that number of days (gnus-summary-limit-to-marks).  If given a prefix, limit to articles that are younger than that number of days.

/ n
     Limit the summary buffer to the current article (gnus-summary-limit-to-articles).  Uses the process/prefix convention (see Process/Prefix).

/ w
     Pop the previous limit off the stack and restore it (gnus-summary-pop-limit).  If given a prefix, pop all limits off the stack.

/ v
     Limit the summary buffer to articles that have a score at or above some score (gnus-summary-limit-to-score).

/ E
M S
     Display all expunged articles (gnus-summary-limit-include-expunged).

/ D
     Display all dormant articles (gnus-summary-limit-include-dormant).

/ d
     Hide all dormant articles (gnus-summary-limit-exclude-dormant).

/ c
     Hide all dormant articles that have no children (gnus-summary-limit-exclude-childless-dormant).

/ C
     Mark all excluded unread articles as read (gnus-summary-limit-mark-excluded-as-read).   If given a prefix, also mark excluded ticked and dormant articles as read.

Threading
=========

Gnus threads articles by default.  To thread is to put responses to articles directly after the articles they respond to---in a hierarchical fashion.

Customizing Threading
---------------------

gnus-show-threads
     If this variable is nil, 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-fetch-old-headers
     If non-nil, Gnus will attempt to build old threads by fetching more old headers---headers to articles that are 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 backend you are using carries overview files---this would normally be nntp, nnspool and nnml.  Also remember that if the root of the thread has been expired by the server, there's not much Gnus can do about that.

gnus-build-sparse-threads
     Fetching old headers can be slow.  A low-rent similar effect can be gotten by setting this variable to some.  Gnus will then look at the complete References headers of all articles and try to string articles that belong in the same thread together.  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-summary-gather-subject-limit
     Loose threads are gathered by comparing subjects of articles.  If this variable is nil, 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 subjects 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-regexp
     This can either be a regular expression or list of regular expressions that match strings that will be removed from subjects if fuzzy subject simplification is used.

gnus-simplify-ignored-prefixes
     If you set gnus-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-summary-gather-exclude-subject
     Since loose thread gathering is done on subjects only, that might lead to many false hits, especially with certain common subjects like and (none).  To make the situation slightly better, you can use the regexp gnus-summary-gather-exclude-subject to say what subjects should be excluded from the gathering process.  The default is ^ *$\\|^(none)$.

gnus-summary-thread-gathering-function
     Gnus gathers threads by looking at Subject 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 includes unrelated articles, but it's 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-subject
          This function is the default gathering function and looks at Subjects exclusively.

     gnus-gather-threads-by-references
          This function looks at References 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-summary-make-false-root
     If non-nil, 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:

     adopt
          Gnus will make the first of the orphaned articles the parent.  This parent will adopt all the other articles.  The adopted articles will be marked as such by pointy brackets (<>) instead of the standard square brackets ([]).  This is the default method.

     dummy
          Gnus will create a dummy summary line that will pretend to be the parent.  This dummy line does not correspond to any real article, so selecting it will just select the first real article after the dummy article.  gnus-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.

     empty
          Gnus won't actually make any article the parent, but simply leave the subject field of all orphans except the first empty.  (Actually, it will use gnus-summary-same-subject as the subject (see Summary Buffer Format).)

     none
          Don't make any article parent at all.  Just gather the threads and display them after one another.

     nil
          Don't gather loose threads.

gnus-thread-hide-subtree
     If non-nil, all threads will be hidden when the summary buffer is generated.

gnus-thread-expunge-below
     All threads that have a total score (as defined by gnus-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-killed
     if you kill a thread and this variable is non-nil, the subtree will be hidden.

gnus-thread-ignore-subject
     Sometimes somebody changes the subject in the middle of a thread.  If this variable is non-nil, the subject change is ignored.  If it is nil, which is the default, a change in the subject will result in a new thread.

gnus-thread-indent-level
     This is a number that says how much each sub-thread should be indented. The default is 4.

gnus-parse-headers-hook
     Hook run before parsing any headers.  The default value is (gnus-decode-rfc1522), which means that QPized headers will be slightly decoded in a hackish way.  This is likely to change in the future when Gnus becomes MIMEified.

Thread Commands
---------------

T k
M-C-k
     Mark all articles in the current (sub-)thread as read (gnus-summary-kill-thread).  If the prefix argument is positive, remove all marks instead.  If the prefix argument is negative, tick articles instead.

T l
M-C-l
     Lower the score of the current (sub-)thread (gnus-summary-lower-thread).

T i
     Increase the score of the current (sub-)thread (gnus-summary-raise-thread).

T #
     Set the process mark on the current (sub-)thread (gnus-uu-mark-thread).

T M-#
     Remove the process mark from the current (sub-)thread (gnus-uu-unmark-thread).

T T
     Toggle threading (gnus-summary-toggle-threads).

T s
     Expose the (sub-)thread hidden under the current article, if any (gnus-summary-show-thread).

T h
     Hide the current (sub-)thread (gnus-summary-hide-thread).

T S
     Expose all hidden threads (gnus-summary-show-all-threads).

T H
     Hide all threads (gnus-summary-hide-all-threads).

T t
     Re-thread the thread the current article is part of (gnus-summary-rethread-current).  This works even when the summary buffer is otherwise unthreaded.

T ^
     Make the current article the child of the marked (or previous) article (gnus-summary-reparent-thread.

The following commands are thread movement commands.  They all understand the numeric prefix.

T n
     Go to the next thread (gnus-summary-next-thread).

T p
     Go to the previous thread (gnus-summary-prev-thread).

T d
     Descend the thread (gnus-summary-down-thread).

T u
     Ascend the thread (gnus-summary-up-thread).

T o
     Go to the top of the 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 is 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 that are fuzzily equal will be included (see Fuzzy Matching).

Sorting
=======

If you are using a threaded summary display, you can sort the threads by setting gnus-thread-sort-functions, which is a list of functions. 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, and gnus-thread-sort-by-total-score.

Each function takes two threads and return 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 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
             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 is 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, 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))

Asynchronous Article Fetching
=============================

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 that 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 backend will pre-fetch the next 30 articles.  If this variable is t, the backend will pre-fetch all the articles that it can without bound.  If it is nil, no pre-fetching will be made.

There are probably some articles that you don't want to pre-fetch---read articles, for instance.  Which articles to pre-fetch is controlled by the gnus-async-prefetch-article-p variable.  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 that are 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 preferrably be short and sweet to avoid slowing down Gnus too much. It's also 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:

read
     Remove articles when they are read.

exit
     Remove articles when exiting the group.

The default value is (read exit).

If gnus-use-header-prefetch is non-nil, prefetch articles from the next group.

Article Caching
===============

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 that are ticked or marked as dormant will then be copied over to your local cache (gnus-cache-directory).  Whether this cache is flat or hierarchal is controlled by the gnus-use-long-file-name variable, as usual.

When re-select 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 that are 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, 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.

It is likely that you do not want caching on some 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 the gnus-uncacheable-groups regexp to ^nnml, for instance.  This variable is nil by default.

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.

Persistent Articles
===================

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:

*
     Make the current article persistent (gnus-cache-enter-article).

M-*
     Remove the current article from the persistent articles (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)

Article Backlog
===============

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.

This variable is nil by default.

Saving Articles
===============

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).

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.

O o
o
     Save the current article using the default article saver (gnus-summary-save-article).

O m
     Save the current article in mail format (gnus-summary-save-article-mail).

O r
     Save the current article in rmail format (gnus-summary-save-article-rmail).

O f
     Save the current article in plain file format (gnus-summary-save-article-file).

O F
     Write the current article in plain file format, overwriting any previous file contents (gnus-summary-write-article-file).

O b
     Save the current article body in plain file format (gnus-summary-save-article-body-file).

O h
     Save the current article in mh folder format (gnus-summary-save-article-folder).

O v
     Save the current article in a VM folder (gnus-summary-save-article-vm).

O p
     Save the current article in a pipe.  Uhm, like, what I mean is---Pipe the current article to a process (gnus-summary-pipe-output).

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 four ready-made functions below, or you can create your own.

gnus-summary-save-in-rmail
     This is the default format, babyl.  Uses the function in the gnus-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-mail
     Save in a Unix mail (mbox) file.  Uses the function in the gnus-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-file
     Append the article straight to an ordinary file.  Uses the function in the gnus-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-file
     Append the article body to an ordinary file.  Uses the function in the gnus-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-folder
     Save the article to an MH folder using rcvstore 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.  The former creates capitalized names, and the latter does not.

gnus-summary-save-in-vm
     Save the article in a VM folder.  You have to have the VM mail reader to use this setting.

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-name
     File names like ~/News/Alt.andrea-dworkin/45.

gnus-numeric-save-name
     File names like ~/News/alt.andrea-dworkin/45.

gnus-Plain-save-name
     File names like ~/News/Alt.andrea-dworkin.

gnus-plain-save-name
     File names like ~/News/alt.andrea-dworkin.

You 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.

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 toplevel 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-save '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 toplevel directory as the argument (~/News/).  Then just walk around to the groups/directories with nneething.

Decoding Articles
=================

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 nonstandard, 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 #.

Uuencoded Articles
------------------

X u
     Uudecodes the current series (gnus-uu-decode-uu).

X U
     Uudecodes and saves the current series (gnus-uu-decode-uu-and-save).

X v u
     Uudecodes and views the current series (gnus-uu-decode-uu-view).

X v U
     Uudecodes, views and saves the current series (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.

Shared Articles
---------------

X s
     Unshars the current series (gnus-uu-decode-unshar).

X S
     Unshars and saves the current series (gnus-uu-decode-unshar-and-save).

X v s
     Unshars and views the current series (gnus-uu-decode-unshar-view).

X v S
     Unshars, views and saves the current series (gnus-uu-decode-unshar-and-save-view).

PostScript Files
----------------

X p
     Unpack the current PostScript series (gnus-uu-decode-postscript).

X P
     Unpack and save the current PostScript series (gnus-uu-decode-postscript-and-save).

X v p
     View the current PostScript series (gnus-uu-decode-postscript-view).

X v P
     View and save the current PostScript series (gnus-uu-decode-postscript-and-save-view).

Decoding Variables
------------------

Adjective, not verb.

Rule Variables
..............

Gnus uses rule variables to decide how to view a file.  All these variables are on the form

           (list '(regexp1 command2)
                 '(regexp2 command2)
                 ...)

gnus-uu-user-view-rules
     This variable is consulted first when viewing files.  If you wish to use, for instance, sox 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-end
     This variable is consulted if Gnus couldn't make any matches from the user and default view rules.

gnus-uu-user-archive-rules
     This variable can be used to say what commands should be used to unpack archives.

Other Decode Variables
......................

gnus-uu-grabbed-file-functions
     All functions in this list will be called right each file has been successfully decoded---so that you can move or view files right away, and don't have to wait for all files to be decoded before you can do anything.  Ready-made functions you can put in this list are:

     gnus-uu-grab-view
          View the file.

     gnus-uu-grab-move
          Move the file (if you're using a saving function.)

gnus-uu-be-dangerous
     Specifies what to do if unusual situations arise during decoding.  If nil, 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-name
     Files with name matching this regular expression won't be viewed.

gnus-uu-ignore-files-by-type
     Files with a MIME type matching this variable won't be viewed. Note that Gnus tries to guess what type the file is based on the name. gnus-uu is not a MIME package (yet), so this is slightly kludgey.

gnus-uu-tmp-dir
     Where gnus-uu does its work.

gnus-uu-do-not-unpack-archives
     Non-nil means that gnus-uu won't peek inside archives looking for files to display.

gnus-uu-view-and-save
     Non-nil means that the user will always be asked to save a file after viewing it.

gnus-uu-ignore-default-view-rules
     Non-nil means that gnus-uu will ignore the default viewing rules.

gnus-uu-ignore-default-archive-rules
     Non-nil means that gnus-uu will ignore the default archive unpacking commands.

gnus-uu-kill-carriage-return
     Non-nil means that gnus-uu will strip all carriage returns from articles.

gnus-uu-unmark-articles-not-decoded
     Non-nil means that gnus-uu will mark articles that were unsuccessfully decoded as unread.

gnus-uu-correct-stripped-uucode
     Non-nil means that gnus-uu will try to fix uuencoded files that have had trailing spaces deleted.

gnus-uu-view-with-metamail
     Non-nil 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-digest
     Non-nil 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 RFC1153---no easy way to specify any meaningful volume and issue numbers were found, so I simply dropped them.

Uuencoding and Posting
......................

gnus-uu-post-include-before-composing
     Non-nil 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-length
     Maximum length of an article.  The encoded file will be split into how many articles it takes to post the entire file.

gnus-uu-post-threaded
     Non-nil means that gnus-uu will post the encoded file in a thread.  This may not be smart, as no other decoder I have seen are 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-description
     Non-nil 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.

Viewing Files
-------------

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?

Article Treatment
=================

Reading through this huge manual, you may have quite forgotten that the object of newsreaders are 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.

Article Highlighting
--------------------

Not only do you want your article buffer to look like fruit salad, but you want it to look like technicolor fruit salad.

W H a
     Highlight the current article (gnus-article-highlight).

W H h
     Highlight the headers (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 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.

W H c
     Highlight cited text (gnus-article-highlight-citation).

     Some variables to customize the citation highlights:

     gnus-cite-parse-max-size
          If the article size if bigger than this variable (which is 25000 by default), no citation highlighting will be performed.

     gnus-cite-prefix-regexp
          Regexp matching the longest possible citation prefix on a line.

     gnus-cite-max-prefix
          Maximum possible length for a citation prefix (default 20).

     gnus-cite-face-list
          List of faces used for highlighting citations.  When there are citations from multiple articles in the same message, Gnus will try to give each citation from each article its own face.  This should make it easier to see who wrote what.

     gnus-supercite-regexp
          Regexp matching normal Supercite attribution lines.

     gnus-supercite-secondary-regexp
          Regexp matching mangled Supercite attribution lines.

     gnus-cite-minimum-match-count
          Minimum number of identical prefixes we have to see before we believe that it's a citation.

     gnus-cite-attribution-prefix
          Regexp matching the beginning of an attribution line.

     gnus-cite-attribution-suffix
          Regexp matching the end of an attribution line.

     gnus-cite-attribution-face
          Face used for attribution lines.  It is merged with the face for the cited text belonging to the attribution.

W H s
     Highlight the signature (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.

Article Fontisizing
-------------------

People commonly add emphasis to words in news articles by writing things like _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-article-emphasis 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 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-article-emphasis
           '(("_\\(\\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-undeline-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)

Article Hiding
--------------

Or rather, hiding certain things in each article.  There usually is much too much cruft in most articles.

W W a
     Do maximum hiding on the summary buffer (gnus-article-hide).

W W h
     Hide headers (gnus-article-hide-headers).  See Hiding Headers.

W W b
     Hide headers that aren't particularly interesting (gnus-article-hide-boring-headers).  See Hiding Headers.

W W s
     Hide signature (gnus-article-hide-signature).  See Article Signature.

W W p
     Hide PGP signatures (gnus-article-hide-pgp).

W W P
     Hide PEM (privacy enhanced messages) gruft (gnus-article-hide-pem).

W W c
     Hide citation (gnus-article-hide-citation).  Some variables for customizing the hiding:

     gnus-cite-hide-percentage
          If the cited text is of a bigger percentage than this variable (default 50), hide the cited text.

     gnus-cite-hide-absolute
          The cited text must be have at least this length (default 10) before it is hidden.

     gnus-cited-text-button-line-format
          Gnus adds buttons show where the cited text has been hidden, and to allow toggle hiding the text.  The format of the variable is specified by this format-like variable (see Formatting Variables).  These specs are legal:

          b
               Start point of the hidden text.

          e
               End point of the hidden text.

          l
               Length of the hidden text.

     gnus-cited-lines-visible
          The number of lines at the beginning of the cited text to leave shown.

W W C
     Hide cited text in articles that aren't roots (gnus-article-hide-citation-in-followups).  This isn't very useful as an interactive command, but might be a handy function to stick in gnus-article-display-hook (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.

Article Washing
---------------

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.

W l
     Remove page breaks from the current article (gnus-summary-stop-page-breaking).

W r
     Do a Caesar rotate (rot13) on the article buffer (gnus-summary-caesar-message).

W t
     Toggle whether to display all headers in the article buffer (gnus-summary-toggle-header).

W v
     Toggle whether to display all headers in the article buffer permanently (gnus-summary-verbose-header).

W m
     Toggle whether to run the article through MIME before displaying (gnus-summary-toggle-mime).

W o
     Treat overstrike (gnus-article-treat-overstrike).

W w
     Do word wrap (gnus-article-fill-cited-article).  If you use this function in gnus-article-display-hook, it should be run fairly late and certainly after any highlighting.

     You can give the command a numerical prefix to specify the width to use when filling.

W c
     Remove CR (gnus-article-remove-cr).

W q
     Treat quoted-printable (gnus-article-de-quoted-unreadable).

W f
     Look for and display any X-Face headers (gnus-article-display-x-face).  The command executed by this function is given by the gnus-article-x-face-command variable. If this variable is a string, this string will be executed in a sub-shell.  If it is a function, this function will be called with the face as the argument.  If the gnus-article-x-face-too-ugly (which is a regexp) matches the From header, the face will not be shown. The default action under Emacs is to fork off an xv to view the face; under XEmacs the default action is to display the face before the From header.  (It's nicer if XEmacs has been compiled with X-Face support---that will make display somewhat faster.  If there's no native X-Face support, Gnus will try to convert the X-Face header using external programs from the pbmplus package and friends.)  If you want to have this function in the display hook, it should probably come last.

W b
     Add clickable buttons to the article (gnus-article-add-buttons).

W B
     Add clickable buttons to the article headers (gnus-article-add-buttons-to-head).

W E l
     Remove all blank lines from the beginning of the article (gnus-article-strip-leading-blank-lines).

W E m
     Replace all blank lines with empty lines and then all multiple empty lines with a single empty line. (gnus-article-strip-multiple-blank-lines).

W E t
     Remove all blank lines at the end of the article (gnus-article-remove-trailing-blank-lines).

W E a
     Do all the three commands above (gnus-article-strip-blank-lines).

W E s
     Remove all white space from the beginning of all lines of the article body (gnus-article-strip-leading-space).

Article Buttons
---------------

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.

Gnus adds buttons to certain standard references by default: Well-formed URLs, mail addresses and Message-IDs.  This is controlled by two variables, one that handles article bodies and one that handles article heads:

gnus-button-alist
     This is an alist where each entry has this form:

          (REGEXP BUTTON-PAR USE-P FUNCTION DATA-PAR)

     regexp
          All text that match this regular expression will be considered an external reference.  Here's a typical regexp that match embedded URLs: <URL:\\([^\n\r>]*\\)>.

     button-par
          Gnus has to know which parts of the match is to be highlighted.  This is a number that says what sub-expression of the regexp that is to be highlighted.  If you want it all highlighted, you use 0 here.

     use-p
          This form will be 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.

     function
          This function will be called when you click on this button.

     data-par
          As with BUTTON-PAR, this is a sub-expression number, but this one says which part of the match is to be sent as data to FUNCTION.

     So the full entry for buttonizing URLs is then

          ("<URL:\\([^\n\r>]*\\)>" 0 t gnus-button-url 1)

gnus-header-button-alist
     This is just like the other alist, except that it is applied to the article head only, and that each entry has an additional element that is used to say what headers to apply the buttonize coding to:

          (HEADER REGEXP BUTTON-PAR USE-P FUNCTION DATA-PAR)

     HEADER is a regular expression.

gnus-button-url-regexp
     A regular expression that matches embedded URLs.  It is used in the default values of the variables above.

gnus-article-button-face
     Face used on buttons.

gnus-article-mouse-face
     Face is used when the mouse cursor is over a button.

Article Date
------------

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.

W T u
     Display the date in UT (aka. GMT, aka ZULU) (gnus-article-date-ut).

W T l
     Display the date in the local timezone (gnus-article-date-local).

W T s
     Display the date using a user-defined format (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 possible format specs.

W T e
     Say how much time has (e)lapsed between the article was posted and now (gnus-article-date-lapsed).

W T o
     Display the original date (gnus-article-date-original).  This can be useful if you normally use some other conversion function and is 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*

Article Signature
-----------------

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.

 1. If it is an integer, no signature may be longer (in characters) than that integer.

 2. If it is a floating point number, no signature may be longer (in lines) than that number.

 3. If it is a function, the function will be called without any parameters, and if it returns nil, there is no signature in the buffer.

 4. If it is a string, it will be used as a regexp.  If it matches, the text in question is not a signature.

This variable can also be a list where the elements may be of the types listed above.

Article Commands
================

A P
     Generate and print a PostScript image of the article buffer (gnus-summary-print-article).  gnus-ps-print-hook will be run just before printing the buffer.

Summary Sorting
===============

You can have the summary buffer sorted in various ways, even though I can't really see why you'd want that.

C-c C-s C-n
     Sort by article number (gnus-summary-sort-by-number).

C-c C-s C-a
     Sort by author (gnus-summary-sort-by-author).

C-c C-s C-s
     Sort by subject (gnus-summary-sort-by-subject).

C-c C-s C-d
     Sort by date (gnus-summary-sort-by-date).

C-c C-s C-l
     Sort by lines (gnus-summary-sort-by-lines).

C-c C-s C-i
     Sort by score (gnus-summary-sort-by-score).

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).

Finding the Parent
==================

If you'd like to read the parent of the current article, and it is not displayed in the summary buffer, you might still be able to.  That is, if the current group is fetched by NNTP, the parent hasn't expired and the 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.

You can have Gnus fetch all articles mentioned in the References header of the article by pushing A R (gnus-summary-refer-references).

You can also ask the NNTP server for an arbitrary article, no matter what group it belongs to.  M-^ (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.

If the group you are reading is located on a backend 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 same as the one that keeps the spool you are reading from updated, but that's not really necessary.

Most of the mail backends support fetching by Message-ID, but do not do a particularly excellent job of it.  That is, nnmbox and nnbabyl are able to locate articles from any groups, while nnml and nnfolder 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.

Alternative Approaches
======================

Different people like to read news using different methods.  This being Gnus, we offer a small selection of minor modes for the summary buffers.

Pick and Read
-------------

Some newsreaders (like nn and, uhm, nn) use a two-phased reading interface.  The user first marks the articles she wants to read from a summary buffer.  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 makes one additional command for switching to the summary buffer available.

Here are the available keystrokes when using pick mode:

.
     Pick the article on the current line (gnus-summary-mark-as-processable).  If given a numerical prefix, go to the article on that line and pick that article.  (The line number is normally displayed on the beginning of the summary pick lines.)

SPACE
     Scroll the summary buffer up one page (gnus-pick-next-page).  If at the end of the buffer, start reading the picked articles.

u
     Unpick the article (gnus-summary-unmark-as-processable).

U
     Unpick all articles (gnus-summary-unmark-all-processable).

t
     Pick the thread (gnus-uu-mark-thread).

T
     Unpick the thread (gnus-uu-unmark-thread).

r
     Pick the region (gnus-uu-mark-region).

R
     Unpick the region (gnus-uu-unmark-region).

e
     Pick articles that match a regexp (gnus-uu-mark-by-regexp).

E
     Unpick articles that match a regexp (gnus-uu-unmark-by-regexp).

b
     Pick the buffer (gnus-uu-mark-buffer).

B
     Unpick the buffer (gnus-uu-unmark-buffer).

RET
     Start reading the picked articles (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.

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 than 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).

Binary Groups
-------------

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.

In fact, the only way to see the actual articles if you have turned this mode on is the g command (gnus-binary-show-article).

gnus-binary-mode-hook is called in binary minor mode buffers.

Tree Display
============

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-hook
     A hook called in all tree mode buffers.

gnus-tree-mode-line-format
     A format string for the mode bar in the tree mode buffers.  The default is Gnus: %%b [%A] %Z.  For a list of legal specs, see Summary Buffer Mode Line.

gnus-selected-tree-face
     Face used for highlighting the selected article in the tree buffer.  The default is modeline.

gnus-tree-line-format
     A format string for the tree nodes.  The name is a bit of a misnomer, though---it doesn't define a line, but just the node.  The default value is %(%[%3,3n%]%), which displays the first three characters of the name of the poster.  It is vital that all nodes are of the same length, so you must use %4,4n-like specifiers.

     Legal specs are:

     n
          The name of the poster.

     f
          The From header.

     N
          The number of the article.

     [
          The opening bracket.

     ]
          The closing bracket.

     s
          The subject.

     See Formatting Variables.

     Variables related to the display are:

     gnus-tree-brackets
          This is used for differentiating between ``real'' articles and ``sparse'' articles.  The format is ((REAL-OPEN . REAL-CLOSE) (SPARSE-OPEN . SPARSE-CLOSE) (DUMMY-OPEN . DUMMY-CLOSE)), and the default is ((?[ . ?]) (?( . ?)) (?{ . ?})).

     gnus-tree-parent-child-edges
          This is a list that contains the characters used for connecting parent nodes to their children.  The default is (?- ?\\ ?|).

gnus-tree-minimize-window
     If this variable is non-nil, 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.

gnus-generate-tree-function
     The function that actually generates the thread tree.  Two predefined functions are available: gnus-generate-horizontal-tree and gnus-generate-vertical-tree (which is the default).

Here's and 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]

Mail Group Commands
===================

Some commands only make sense in mail groups.  If these commands are illegal 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).

B e
     Expire all expirable articles in the group (gnus-summary-expire-articles).

B M-C-e
     Delete all the expirable articles in the group (gnus-summary-expire-articles-now).  This means that all articles that are eligible for expiry in the current group will disappear forever into that big /dev/null in the sky.

B DEL
     Delete the mail article.  This is ``delete'' as in ``delete it from your disk forever and ever, never to return again.'' Use with caution. (gnus-summary-delete-article).

B m
     Move the article from one mail group to another (gnus-summary-move-article).

B c
     Copy the article from one group (mail group or not) to a mail group (gnus-summary-copy-article).

B C
     Crosspost the current article to some other group (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.

B i
     Import an arbitrary file into the current mail newsgroup (gnus-summary-import-article).  You will be prompted for a file name, a From header and a Subject header.

B r
     Respool the mail article (gnus-summary-move-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.

B w
e
     Edit the current article (gnus-summary-edit-article).  To finish editing and make the changes permanent, type C-c C-c (gnus-summary-edit-article-done).

B q
     If you want to re-spool an article, you might be curious as to what group the article will end up in before you do the re-spooling.  This command will tell you (gnus-summary-respool-query).

B p
     Some people have a tendency to send you "courtesy" copies when they follow up to articles you have posted.  These usually have a 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.

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.

     (setq gnus-move-split-methods
           '(("^From:.*Lars Magne" "nnml:junk")
             ("^Subject:.*gnus" "nnfolder:important")
             (".*" "nnml:misc")))

Various Summary Stuff
=====================

gnus-summary-mode-hook
     This hook is called when creating a summary mode buffer.

gnus-summary-generate-hook
     This is called as the last thing before doing the threading and the generation of the summary buffer.  It's quite convenient for customizing the threading variables based on what data the newsgroup has.  This hook is called from the summary buffer after most summary buffer variables has been set.

gnus-summary-prepare-hook
     Is is called after the summary buffer has been generated.  You might use it to, for instance, highlight lines or modify the look of the buffer in some other ungodly manner.  I don't care.

gnus-summary-ignore-duplicates
     When Gnus discovers two articles that have the same Message-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.

Summary Group Information
-------------------------

H f
     Try to fetch the FAQ (list of frequently asked questions) for the current group (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 probably will be used for fetching the file.

H d
     Give a brief description of the current group (gnus-summary-describe-group).  If given a prefix, force rereading the description from the server.

H h
     Give an extremely brief description of the most important summary keystrokes (gnus-summary-describe-briefly).

H i
     Go to the Gnus info node (gnus-info-find-node).

Searching for Articles
----------------------

M-s
     Search through all subsequent articles for a regexp (gnus-summary-search-article-forward).

M-r
     Search through all previous articles for a regexp (gnus-summary-search-article-backward).

&
     This command will prompt you for a header field, a regular expression to match on this field, and a command to be executed if the match is made (gnus-summary-execute-command).

M-&
     Perform any operation on all articles that have been marked with the process mark (gnus-summary-universal-argument).

Summary Generation Commands
---------------------------

Y g
     Regenerate the current summary buffer (gnus-summary-prepare).

Y c
     Pull all cached articles (for the current group) into the summary buffer (gnus-summary-insert-cached-articles).

Really Various Summary Commands
-------------------------------

C-d
     If the current article is a collection of other articles (for instance, a digest), you might use this command to enter a group based on the that article (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 on some format, you C-d and read these messages in a more convenient fashion.

M-C-d
     This command is very similar to the one above, but lets you gather several documents into one biiig group (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).

C-t
     Toggle truncation of summary lines (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.

=
     Expand the summary buffer window (gnus-summary-expand-window). If given a prefix, force an article window configuration.

Exiting the Summary Buffer
==========================

Exiting from the summary buffer will normally update all info on the group and return you to the group buffer.

Z Z
q
     Exit the current group and update all information on the group (gnus-summary-exit). gnus-summary-prepare-exit-hook is called before doing much of the exiting, and calls gnus-summary-expire-articles by default. gnus-summary-exit-hook is called after finishing the exiting process.  gnus-group-no-more-groups-hook is run when returning to group mode having no more (unread) groups.

Z E
Q
     Exit the current group without updating any information on the group (gnus-summary-exit-no-update).

Z c
c
     Mark all unticked articles in the group as read and then exit (gnus-summary-catchup-and-exit).

Z C
     Mark all articles, even the ticked ones, as read and then exit (gnus-summary-catchup-all-and-exit).

Z n
     Mark all articles as read and go to the next group (gnus-summary-catchup-and-goto-next-group).

Z R
     Exit this group, and then enter it again (gnus-summary-reselect-current-group).  If given a prefix, select all articles, both read and unread.

Z G
M-g
     Exit the group, check for new articles in the group, and select the group (gnus-summary-rescan-group).  If given a prefix, select all articles, both read and unread.

Z N
     Exit the group and go to the next group (gnus-summary-next-group).

Z P
     Exit the group and go to the previous group (gnus-summary-prev-group).

Z s
     Save the current number of read/marked articles in the dribble buffer and then save the dribble buffer (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.

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).

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.

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 satisfactorily for some users for various reasons.

 1. The NNTP server may fail to generate the Xref header.  This is evil and not very common.

 2. The NNTP server may fail to include the Xref header in the .overview data bases.  This is evil and all too common, alas.

 3. You may be reading the same group (or several related groups) from different NNTP servers.

 4. You may be getting mail that duplicates articles posted to groups.

I'm sure there are other situations that 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 the the M mark.  It doesn't care what group it saw the article in.

gnus-suppress-duplicates
     If non-nil, suppress duplicates.

gnus-save-duplicate-list
     If non-nil, 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 that is read in a single Gnus session are suppressed.

gnus-duplicate-list-length
     This variables says how many Message-IDs to keep in the duplicate suppression list.  The default is 10000.

gnus-duplicate-file
     The name of the file to store the duplicate suppression list.  The default is ~/News/suppression.

If 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.

The Article 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.

Hiding Headers
==============

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 nauseum---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-headers
     If this variable is non-nil, 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 that are to remain visible.

gnus-ignored-headers
     This variable is the reverse of gnus-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 that are 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 that are listed in this variable.

You can hide further boring headers by entering gnus-article-hide-boring-headers into gnus-article-display-hook.  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 is lists various boring conditions that Gnus can check and remove from sight.

These conditions are:

empty
     Remove all empty headers.

newsgroups
     Remove the Newsgroups header if it only contains the current group name.

followup-to
     Remove the Followup-To header if it is identical to the Newsgroups header.

reply-to
     Remove the Reply-To header if it lists the same address as the From header.

date
     Remove the Date header if the article is less than three days old.

To include the four first elements, you could say something like;

     (setq gnus-boring-article-headers
           '(empty newsgroups followup-to reply-to))

This is also the default value for this variable.

Using MIME
==========

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 handles MIME by pushing the articles through gnus-show-mime-method, which is metamail-buffer by default.  Set gnus-show-mime to t if you want to use MIME all the time.  However, if gnus-strict-mime is non-nil, the MIME method will only be used if there are MIME headers in the article.  If you have gnus-show-mime set, then you'll see some unfortunate display glitches in the article buffer.  These can't be avoided.

It might be best to just use the toggling functions from the summary 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 streaming out 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.

Customizing Articles
====================

The gnus-article-display-hook is called after the article has been inserted into the article buffer.  It is meant to handle all treatment of the article before it is displayed.

By default this hook just contains gnus-article-hide-headers, gnus-article-treat-overstrike, and gnus-article-maybe-highlight, but there are thousands, nay millions, of functions you can put in this hook.  For an overview of functions see Article Highlighting, see Article Hiding, see Article Washing, see Article Buttons and see Article Date.  Note that the order of functions in this hook might affect things, so you may have to fiddle a bit to get the desired results.

You can, of course, write your own functions.  The functions are called from the article buffer, 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.  However, you shouldn't delete any headers.  Instead make them invisible if you want to make them go away.

Article Keymap
==============

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.

A few additional keystrokes are available:

SPACE
     Scroll forwards one page (gnus-article-next-page).

DEL
     Scroll backwards one page (gnus-article-prev-page).

C-c ^
     If point is in the neighborhood of a Message-ID and you press r, Gnus will try to get that article from the server (gnus-article-refer-article).

C-c C-m
     Send a reply to the address near point (gnus-article-mail).  If given a prefix, include the mail.

s
     Reconfigure the buffers so that the summary buffer becomes visible (gnus-article-show-summary).

?
     Give a very brief description of the available keystrokes (gnus-article-describe-briefly).

TAB
     Go to the next button, if any (gnus-article-next-button.  This only makes sense if you have buttonizing turned on.

M-TAB
     Go to the previous button, if any (gnus-article-prev-button.

Misc Article
============

gnus-single-article-buffer
     If non-nil, 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-prepare-hook
     This hook is called right after the article has been inserted into the article buffer.  It is mainly intended for functions that do something depending on the contents; it should probably not be used for changing the contents of the article buffer.

gnus-article-display-hook
     This hook is called as the last thing when displaying an article, and is intended for modifying the contents of the buffer, doing highlights, hiding headers, and the like.

gnus-article-mode-hook
     Hook called in article mode buffers.

gnus-article-mode-syntax-table
     Syntax table used in article buffers.  It is initialized from text-mode-syntax-table.

gnus-article-mode-line-format
     This variable is a format string along the same lines as gnus-summary-mode-line-format.  It accepts the same format specifications as that variable, with one extension:

     w
          The wash status of the article.  This is a short string with one character for each possible article wash operation that may have been performed.

gnus-break-pages
     Controls whether page breaking is to take place.  If this variable is non-nil, 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-delimiter
     This is the delimiter mentioned above.  By default, it is ^L (form linefeed).

Composing Messages
******************

All 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 The Message Manual.  If you are in a foreign news group, and you wish to post the article using the foreign server, you can give a prefix to C-c C-c to make Gnus try to post using the foreign server.

Also see Canceling and Superseding for information on how to remove articles you shouldn't have posted.

Mail
====

Variables for customizing outgoing mail:

gnus-uu-digest-headers
     List of regexps to match headers included in digested messages.  The headers will be included in the sequence they are matched.

gnus-add-to-list
     If non-nil, add a to-list group parameter to mail groups that have none when you do a a.

Post
====

Variables for composing news articles:

gnus-sent-message-ids-file
     Gnus will keep a Message-ID history file of all the mails it has sent.  If it discovers that it has already sent a mail, it will ask the user whether to re-send the mail.  (This is primarily useful when dealing with SOUP packets and the like where one is apt to sent the same packet multiple times.)  This variable says what the name of this history file is.  It is ~/News/Sent-Message-IDs by default.  Set this variable to nil if you don't want Gnus to keep a history file.

gnus-sent-message-ids-length
     This variable says how many Message-IDs to keep in the history file.  It is 1000 by default.

Posting Server
==============

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.  Normally, Gnus will use the same native server.  However.  If your native server 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 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.

Mail and Post
=============

Here's a list of variables that are relevant to both mailing and posting:

gnus-mailing-list-groups

     If your news server offers groups that are really mailing lists that are gatewayed to the NNTP server, you can read those groups without problems, but you can't post/followup to them without some difficulty. One solution is to add a to-address to the group parameters (see Group Parameters).  An easier thing to do is set the gnus-mailing-list-groups to a regexp that match 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.

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)

Archived Messages
=================

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.

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/"))

You can, however, use any mail select method (nnml, nnmbox, etc.).  nnfolder is a quite likeable 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:

  * a string Messages will be saved in that group.

  * a list of strings Messages will be saved in all those groups.

  * an alist of regexps, functions and forms When a key ``matches'', the result is used.

  * nil No message archiving will take place.  This is the default.

Let'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" (current-time))))))

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 also 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.

XEmacs 19.13 doesn't have format-time-string, so you'll have to use a different value for gnus-message-archive-group there.

gnus-outgoing-message-group
     All outgoing messages will be put in this group.  If you want to store all your outgoing mail and articles in the group nnml:archive, you set this variable to that value.  This variable can also be a list of group names.

     If 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.

Select Methods
**************

A foreign group is a group that is 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 backend 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 backend in question.

One could say that a select method defines a virtual server---so we do just that (see The Server Buffer).

The name of the group is the name the backend 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 backend just knows this group as soc.motss.

The different methods all have their peculiarities, of course.

The Server Buffer
=================

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 backend 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 backend represents a virtual server.

For instance, the nntp backend 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 backend to use, and what parameters to set by specifying a select method.

These select methods 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. Anyways, 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, user the ^ (gnus-group-enter-server-mode) command in the group buffer.

gnus-server-mode-hook is run when creating the server buffer.

Server Buffer Format
--------------------

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:

h
     How the news is fetched---the backend name.

n
     The name of this server.

w
     Where the news is to be fetched from---the address.

s
     The opened/closed/denied status of the server.

The mode line can also be customized by using the gnus-server-mode-line-format variable.  The following specs are understood:

S
     Server name.

M
     Server method.

Also see Formatting Variables.

Server Commands
---------------

a
     Add a new server (gnus-server-add-server).

e
     Edit a server (gnus-server-edit-server).

SPACE
     Browse the current server (gnus-server-read-server).

q
     Return to the group buffer (gnus-server-exit).

k
     Kill the current server (gnus-server-kill-server).

y
     Yank the previously killed server (gnus-server-yank-server).

c
     Copy the current server (gnus-server-copy-server).

l
     List all servers (gnus-server-list-servers).

s
     Request that the server scan its sources for new articles (gnus-server-scan-server).  This is mainly sensible with mail servers.

g
     Request that the server regenerate all its data structures (gnus-server-regenerate-server).  This can be useful if you have a mail backend that has gotten out of synch.

Example Methods
---------------

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 backend, and the second is the address, or name, if you will.

After these two elements, there may be a arbitrary number of (VARIABLE FORM) pairs.

To go back to the first example---imagine that you want to read from port 15 from 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 backend to find out what variables are relevant, but here's an nnmh example.

nnmh is a mail backend 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 you 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-address "the.firewall.machine")
           (nntp-open-connection-function nntp-open-rlogin)
           (nntp-end-of-line "\n")
           (nntp-rlogin-parameters
            ("telnet" "the.real.nntp.host" "nntp")))

Creating a Virtual Server
-------------------------

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 nnspool to read the cache.  You could also use nnml or nnmh, though.

Type a nnspool RET cache RET.

You should now have a brand new nnspool 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:

     (nnspool "cache")

Change that to:

     (nnspool "cache"
              (nnspool-spool-directory "~/News/cache/")
              (nnspool-nov-directory "~/News/cache/")
              (nnspool-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.

Server Variables
----------------

One sticky point when defining variables (both on backends 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 backend, see each backend'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"))

Servers and Methods
-------------------

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.

Unavailable Servers
-------------------

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 the 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 from 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 The Server Buffer) and poke it with the following commands:

O
     Try to establish connection to the server on the current line (gnus-server-open-server).

C
     Close the connection (if any) to the server (gnus-server-close-server).

D
     Mark the current server as unreachable (gnus-server-deny-server).

M-o
     Open the connections to all servers in the buffer (gnus-server-open-all-servers).

M-c
     Close the connections to all servers in the buffer (gnus-server-close-all-servers).

R
     Remove all marks to whether Gnus was denied connection from all servers (gnus-server-remove-denials).

Getting News
============

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.

NNTP
----

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-hook
     nntp-server-opened-hook is run after a connection has been made. It can be used to send commands to the NNTP server after it has been contacted.  By default is sends the command MODE READER to the server with the nntp-send-mode-reader function.

nntp-authinfo-function
     This function will be used to send AUTHINFO to the NNTP server.  Available functions include:

     nntp-send-authinfo
          This function will used you current login name as the user name and will prompt you for the password.  This is the default.

     nntp-send-nosy-authinfo
          This function will prompt you for both user name and password.

     nntp-send-authinfo-from-file
          This function will use your current login name as the user name and will read the NNTP password from ~/.nntp-authinfo.

nntp-server-action-alist
     This is an list of regexps to match on server types and actions to be taken when matches are made.  For instance, if you want Gnus to beep every time you connect to innd, you could say something like:

          (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-request
     If the NNTP server doesn't support NOV headers, this backend will collect headers by sending a series of head commands.  To speed things up, the backend 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-timeout
     If you have lots of foreign nntp 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 backend should wait for a connection before giving up.  If it is nil, which is the default, no timeouts are done.

nntp-command-timeout
     If you're running Gnus on a machine that has a dynamically assigned address, Gnus may become confused.  If the address of your machine changes after connecting to the NNTP server, Gnus will simply sit waiting forever for replies from the server.  To help with this unfortunate problem, you can set this command to a number.  Gnus will then, if it sits waiting longer than that number of seconds for a reply from the server, shut down the connection, start a new one, and resend the command.  This should hopefully be transparent to the user.  A likely number is 30 seconds.

nntp-retry-on-break
     If this variable is non-nil, you can also C-g if Gnus hangs.  This will have much the same effect as the command timeout described above.

nntp-server-hook
     This hook is run as the last step when connecting to an NNTP server.

nntp-open-connection-function
     This function is used to connect to the remote system.  Two pre-made functions are nntp-open-network-stream, which is the default, and simply connects to some port or other on the remote system.  The other is nntp-open-rlogin, which does an rlogin on the remote system, and then does a telnet to the NNTP server available there.

nntp-rlogin-parameters
     If you use nntp-open-rlogin as the nntp-open-connection-function, this list will be used as the parameter list given to rsh.

nntp-end-of-line
     String to use as end-of-line markers when talking to the NNTP server.  This is \r\n by default, but should be \n when using rlogin to talk to the server.

nntp-rlogin-user-name
     User name on the remote system when using the rlogin connect function.

nntp-address
     The address of the remote system running the NNTP server.

nntp-port-number
     Port number to connect to when using the nntp-open-network-stream connect function.

nntp-buggy-select
     Set this to non-nil if your select routine is buggy.

nntp-nov-is-evil
     If the NNTP server does not support NOV, you could set this variable to t, but nntp usually checks whether NOV can be used automatically.

nntp-xover-commands
     List of strings that are used as commands to fetch NOV lines from a server.  The default value of this variable is ("XOVER" "XOVERVIEW").

nntp-nov-gap
     nntp 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 do not want, and will not use.  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.

nntp-prepare-server-hook
     A hook run before attempting to connect to an NNTP server.

nntp-warn-about-losing-connection
     If this variable is non-nil, some noise will be made when a server closes connection.

News Spool
----------

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.

Anyways, 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-program
     Program used to post an article.

nnspool-inews-switches
     Parameters given to the inews program when posting an article.

nnspool-spool-directory
     Where nnspool looks for the articles.  This is normally /usr/spool/news/.

nnspool-nov-directory
     Where nnspool will look for NOV files.  This is normally /usr/spool/news/over.view/.

nnspool-lib-dir
     Where the news lib dir is (/usr/lib/news/ by default).

nnspool-active-file
     The path of the active file.

nnspool-newsgroups-file
     The path of the group descriptions file.

nnspool-history-file
     The path of the news history file.

nnspool-active-times-file
     The path of the active date file.

nnspool-nov-is-evil
     If non-nil, nnspool won't try to use any NOV files that it finds.

nnspool-sift-nov-with-sed
     If non-nil, 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.

Getting Mail
============

Reading mail with a newsreader---isn't that just plain WeIrD? But of course.

Getting Started Reading Mail
----------------------------

It's quite easy to use Gnus to read your new mail.  You just plonk the mail backend 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 backend), you could put the following in your .gnus file:

     (setq gnus-secondary-select-methods
           '((nnml "private")))

Now, the next time you start Gnus, this backend 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 latter 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 Backend and see Expiring Mail.

Splitting 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.

If the first element is the special symbol junk, then messages that match the regexp will disappear into the aether.  Use with extreme caution.

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 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 groups names that it thinks should carry this mail message.

Note that the mail backends 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 backends 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 files 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.

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 Backend Variables
----------------------

These variables are (for the most part) pertinent to all the various mail backends.

nnmail-read-incoming-hook
     The mail backends all call this hook after reading new mail.  You can use this hook to notify any mail watch programs, if you want to.

nnmail-spool-file
     The backends will look for new mail in this file.  If this variable is nil, the mail backends will never attempt to fetch mail by themselves.  If you are using a POP mail server and your name is larsi, you should set this variable to po:larsi.  If your name is not larsi, you should probably modify that slightly, but you may have guessed that already, you smart & handsome devil!  You can also set this variable to pop, and Gnus will try to figure out the POP mail string by itself.  In any case, Gnus will call movemail which will contact the POP server named in the MAILHOST environment variable.  If the POP server needs a password, you can either set nnmail-pop-password-required to t and be prompted for the password, or set nnmail-pop-password to the password itself.

     nnmail-spool-file can also be a list of mailboxes.

     Your Emacs has to have been configured with --with-pop before compilation.  This is the default, but some installations have it switched off.

     When you use a mail backend, 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 backend---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.

nnmail-use-procmail
     If non-nil, the mail backends will look in nnmail-procmail-directory for incoming mail.  All the files in that directory that have names ending in nnmail-procmail-suffix will be considered incoming mailboxes, and will be searched for new mail.

nnmail-crash-box
     When the mail backends read a spool file, it is first moved to this file, which is ~/.gnus-crash-box by default.  If this file already exists, it will always be read (and incorporated) before any other spool files.

nnmail-prepare-incoming-hook
     This is run in a buffer that holds all the new incoming mail, and can be used for, well, anything, really.

nnmail-split-hook
     Hook run in the buffer where the mail headers of each message is kept just before the splitting based on these headers is done.  The hook is free to modify the buffer contents in any way it sees fit---the buffer is discarded after the splitting has been done, and no changes performed in the buffer will show up in any files.  gnus-article-decode-rfc1522 is one likely function to add to this hook.

nnmail-pre-get-new-mail-hook
nnmail-post-get-new-mail-hook
     These are two useful hooks executed when treating new incoming mail---nnmail-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 'gnus-pre-get-new-mail-hook
                    (lambda () (set-default-file-modes 511)))

          (add-hook 'gnus-post-get-new-mail-hook
                    (lambda () (set-default-file-modes 551)))

nnmail-tmp-directory
     This variable says where to move the incoming mail to while processing it.  This is usually done in the same directory that the mail backend inhabits (i.e., ~/Mail/), but if this variable is non-nil, it will be used instead.

nnmail-movemail-program
     This program is executed to move mail from the user's inbox to her home directory.  The default is movemail.

     This can also be a function.  In that case, the function will be called with two parameters -- the name of the inbox, and the file to be moved to.

nnmail-delete-incoming
     If non-nil, the mail backends will delete the temporary incoming file after splitting mail into the proper groups.  This is t by default.

     (No Gnus release since (ding) Gnus 0.10 (or something like that) have lost mail, I think, but that's not the point.  (Except certain versions of Red Gnus.))  By not deleting the Incoming* files, one can be sure to not lose mail -- if Gnus totally whacks out, one can always recover what was lost.

     Delete the Incoming* files at will.

nnmail-use-long-file-names
     If non-nil, the mail backends will use long file and directory names.  Groups like mail.misc will end up in directories like mail.misc/.  If it is nil, the same group will end up in mail/misc/.

nnmail-delete-file-function
     Function called to delete files.  It is delete-file by default.

nnmail-cache-accepted-message-ids
     If non-nil, put the Message-IDs of articles imported into the backend (via Gcc, for instance) into the mail duplication discovery cache.  The default is nil.

Fancy Mail Splitting
--------------------

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")
           ;; 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 five possible split syntaxes:

 1. group: If the split is a string, that will be taken as a group name.

 2. (FIELD VALUE SPLIT): If the split is a list, and the first element is a string, then that means that if header FIELD (a regexp) contains VALUE (also a regexp), then store the message as specified by SPLIT.

 3. (| SPLIT...): If the split is a list, and the first element is | (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.

 4. (& SPLIT...): If the split is a list, and the first element is &, then process all SPLITs in the list.

 5. junk: If the split is the symbol junk, then don't save this message anywhere.

 6. (: FUNCTION ARG1 ARG2 ...):  If the split is a list, and the first element is :, then the second element will be called as a function with ARGS given as arguments.  The function should return a SPLIT.

In these splits, FIELD must match a complete field name. VALUE must match a complete word according to the fundamental mode syntax table.  You can use .* in the regexps to match partial field names or words.  In other words, all VALUE's are wrapped in \< and \> pairs.

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 the cells contains the key, and the cdr contains a string.

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, you can say things like:

     (any "debian-\(\\w*\\)@lists.debian.org" "mail.debian.\\1")

That is, do replace-match-like substitions in the group names.

Mail and Procmail
-----------------

Many people use procmail (or some other mail filter program or external delivery agent---slocal, elm, etc) to split incoming mail into groups.  If you do that, you should set nnmail-spool-file to procmail to ensure that the mail backends never ever try to fetch mail by themselves.

This also means that you probably don't want to set nnmail-split-methods either, which has some, perhaps, unexpected side effects.

When a mail backend is queried for what groups it carries, it replies with the contents of that variable, along with any groups it has figured out that it carries by other means.  None of the backends (except nnmh) actually go out to the disk and check what groups actually exist.  (It's not trivial to distinguish between what the user thinks is a basis for a newsgroup and what is just a plain old file or directory.)

This means that you have to tell Gnus (and the backends) what groups exist by hand.

Let's take the nnmh backend as an example.

The folders are located in nnmh-directory, say, ~/Mail/. There are three folders, foo, bar and mail.baz.

Go to the group buffer and type G m.  When prompted, answer foo for the name and nnmh for the method.  Repeat twice for the two other groups, bar and mail.baz.  Be sure to include all your mail groups.

That's it.  You are now set to read your mail.  An active file for this method will be created automatically.

If you use nnfolder or any other backend that store more than a single article in each file, you should never have procmail add mails to the file that Gnus sees.  Instead, procmail should put all incoming mail in nnmail-procmail-directory.  To arrive at the file name to put the incoming mail in, append nnmail-procmail-suffix to the group name.  The mail backends will read the mail from these files.

When Gnus reads a file called mail.misc.spool, this mail will be put in the mail.misc, as one would expect.  However, if you want Gnus to split the mail the normal way, you could set nnmail-resplit-incoming to t.

If you use procmail to split things directory into an nnmh directory (which you shouldn't do), you should set nnmail-keep-last-article to non-nil to prevent Gnus from ever expiring the final article (i. e., the article with the highest article number) in a mail newsgroup.  This is quite, quite important.

Here's an example setup:  The incoming spools are located in ~/incoming/ and have "" as suffixes (i. e., the incoming spool files have the same names as the equivalent groups).  The nnfolder backend is to be used as the mail interface, and the nnfolder directory is ~/fMail/.

     (setq nnfolder-directory "~/fMail/")
     (setq nnmail-spool-file 'procmail)
     (setq nnmail-procmail-directory "~/incoming/")
     (setq gnus-secondary-select-methods '((nnfolder "")))
     (setq nnmail-procmail-suffix "")

Incorporating Old Mail
----------------------

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 backends, 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:

 1. Go to the group buffer.

 2. Type `G f' and give the path of the mbox file when prompted to create an nndoc group from the mbox file (see Foreign Groups).

 3. Type `SPACE' to enter the newly created group.

 4. Type `M P b' to process-mark all articles in this group (see Setting Process Marks).

 5. Type `B r' to respool all the process-marked articles, and answer nnml when prompted (see Mail Group Commands).

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 backend to another.  Just respool all the mail in the old mail groups using the new mail backend.

Expiring Mail
-------------

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.  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.  Groups that match the regular expression gnus-auto-expirable-newsgroups will have all articles that you read marked as expirable automatically.  All articles that are marked as expirable have an E in the first column in the summary buffer.

Note that making a group auto-expirable don't mean that all read articles are expired---only the articles that are marked as expirable will be expired.  Also note the using the d command won't make groups 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 doesn'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 that 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 be either a number (not necessarily an integer) or the symbols immediate or never.

You can also use the expiry-wait group parameter to selectively change the expiry period (see Group Parameters).

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.

Washing Mail
------------

Mailers and list servers are notorious for doing all sorts of really, really stupid things with mail.  ``Hey, RFC822 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 RFC822 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 disc.  For that purpose, we have three hooks and various functions that can be put in these hooks.

nnmail-prepare-incoming-hook
     This hook is called before doing anything with the mail and is meant for grand, sweeping gestures.  Functions to be used include:

     nnheader-ms-strip-cr
          Remove trailing carriage returns from each line.  This is default on Emacs running on MS machines.

nnmail-prepare-incoming-header-hook
     This hook is called narrowed to each header.  It can be used when cleaning up the headers.  Functions that can be used include:

     nnmail-remove-leading-whitespace
          Clear leading white space that ``helpful'' listservs have added to the headers too make them look nice.  Aaah.

     nnmail-remove-list-identifiers
          Some list servers add an identifier---for example, (idm)---to the beginning of all Subject 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.

          For instance, if you want to remove the (idm) and the nagnagnag identifiers:

               (setq nnmail-list-identifiers
                     '("(idm)" "nagnagnag"))

     nnmail-remove-tabs
          Translate all TAB characters into SPACE characters.

nnmail-prepare-incoming-message-hook
     This hook is called narrowed to each message.  Functions to be used include:

     article-de-quoted-unreadable
          Decode Quoted Readable encoding.

Duplicates
----------

If you are a member of a couple of mailing list, you will sometime 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" "duplication 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:")
             ;; 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!

Not Reading Mail
----------------

If you start using any of the mail backends, 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 nnmail-spool-file to nil, none of the backends 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 backends have variables called backend-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 backends will call nn*-prepare-save-mail-hook narrowed to the article to be saved before saving it when reading incoming mail.

Choosing a Mail Backend
-----------------------

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.

Unix Mail Box
.............

The nnmbox backend 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-file
     The name of the mail box in the user's home directory.

nnmbox-active-file
     The name of the active file for the mail box.

nnmbox-get-new-mail
     If non-nil, nnmbox will read incoming mail and split it into groups.

Rmail Babyl
...........

The nnbabyl backend 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-file
     The name of the rmail mbox file.

nnbabyl-active-file
     The name of the active file for the rmail box.

nnbabyl-get-new-mail
     If non-nil, nnbabyl will read incoming mail.

Mail Spool
..........

The nnml spool mail format isn't compatible with any other known format.  It should be used with some caution.

If you use this backend, Gnus will split all incoming mail into files; one file for each mail, and put the articles into the correct 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 backend.  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 backend 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 is the fastest backend when it comes to reading mail.

Virtual server settings:

nnml-directory
     All nnml directories will be placed under this directory.

nnml-active-file
     The active file for the nnml server.

nnml-newsgroups-file
     The nnml group descriptions file.  See Newsgroups File Format.

nnml-get-new-mail
     If non-nil, nnml will read incoming mail.

nnml-nov-is-evil
     If non-nil, this backend will ignore any NOV files.

nnml-nov-file-name
     The name of the NOV files.  The default is .overview.

nnml-prepare-save-mail-hook
     Hook run narrowed to an article before saving.

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).

MH Spool
........

nnmh is just like nnml, except that is doesn't generate NOV databases and it doesn't keep an active file.  This makes nnmh a much slower backend than nnml, but it also makes it easier to write procmail scripts for.

Virtual server settings:

nnmh-directory
     All nnmh directories will be located under this directory.

nnmh-get-new-mail
     If non-nil, nnmh will read incoming mail.

nnmh-be-safe
     If non-nil, 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.

Mail Folders
............

nnfolder is a backend 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.

Virtual server settings:

nnfolder-directory
     All the nnfolder mail boxes will be stored under this directory.

nnfolder-active-file
     The name of the active file.

nnfolder-newsgroups-file
     The name of the group descriptions file.  See Newsgroups File Format.

nnfolder-get-new-mail
     If non-nil, nnfolder will read incoming mail.

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.

Other Sources
=============

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.

Directory Groups
----------------

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, that most wonderful of all wonderful Emacs packages.  When I wrote nndir, I didn't think much about it---a backend 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 the directory name, ange-ftp 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'' backend---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.

Anything Groups
---------------

From the nndir backend (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-directory
     All the mapping files for solid nneething groups will be stored in this directory, which defaults to ~/.nneething/.

nneething-exclude-files
     All files that match this regexp will be ignored.  Nice to use to exclude auto-save files and the like, which is what it does by default.

nneething-map-file
     Name of the map files.

Document Groups
---------------

nndoc is a cute little thing that will let you read a single file as a newsgroup.  Several files types are supported:

babyl
     The babyl (rmail) mail box.

mbox
     The standard Unix mbox file.

mmdf
     The MMDF mail box format.

news
     Several news articles appended into a file.

rnews
     The rnews batch transport format.

forward
     Forwarded articles.

mime-digest
     MIME (RFC 1341) digest format.

standard-digest
     The standard (RFC 1153) digest format.

slack-digest
     Non-standard digest format---matches most things, but does it badly.

You 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 backend, 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-type
     This should be one of mbox, babyl, digest, mmdf, forward, rfc934, rfc822-forward, news, rnews, mime-digest, clari-briefs, or guess.

nndoc-post-type
     This variable says whether Gnus is to consider the group a news group or a mail group.  There are two legal values:  mail (the default) and news.

Document Server Internals
.........................

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-article
     If present, nndoc will skip past all text until it finds something that match this regexp.  All text before this will be totally ignored.

article-begin
     This setting has to be present in all document type definitions.  It says what the beginning of each article looks like.

head-begin-function
     If present, this should be a function that moves point to the head of the article.

nndoc-head-begin
     If present, this should be a regexp that matches the head of the article.

nndoc-head-end
     This should match the end of the head of the article.  It defaults to ^$---the empty line.

body-begin-function
     If present, this function should move point to the beginning of the body of the article.

body-begin
     This should match the beginning of the body of the article.  It defaults to ^\n.

body-end-function
     If present, this function should move point to the end of the body of the article.

body-end
     If present, this should match the end of the body of the article.

nndoc-file-end
     If present, this should match the end of the file.  All text after this regexp will be totally ignored.

So, 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-function
     If present, this function will be called when requesting an article.  It will be called with point at the start of the body, and is useful if the document has encoded some parts of its contents.

article-transform-function
     If present, this function is called when requesting an article.  It's meant to be used how more wide-ranging transformation of both head and body of the article.

generate-head-function
     If present, this function is called to generate a head that Gnus can understand.  It is called with the article number as a parameter, and is expected to generate a nice head for the article in question.  It is called when requesting the headers of all articles.

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 each 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 legal number.

SOUP
----

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 a 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:

server
     This is the machine that is connected to the outside world and where you get news and/or mail from.

home machine
     This is the machine that you want to do the actual reading and responding on.  It is typically not connected to the rest of the world in any way.

packet
     Something that contains messages and/or commands.  There are two kinds of packets:

     message packets
          These are packets made at the server, and typically contains lots of messages for you to read.  These are called SoupoutX.tgz by default, where X is a number.

     response packets
          These are packets made at the home machine, and typically contains replies that you've written.  These are called SoupinX.tgz by default, where X is a number.

 1. You log in on the server and create a SOUP packet.  You can either use a dedicated SOUP thingie (like the 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).

 2. You transfer the packet home.  Rail, boat, car or modem will do fine.

 3. You put the packet in your home directory.

 4. You fire up Gnus on your home machine using the nnsoup backend as the native or secondary server.

 5. You read articles and mail and answer and followup to the things you want (see SOUP Replies).

 6. You do the G s r command to pack these replies into a SOUP packet.

 7. You transfer this packet to the server.

 8. You use Gnus to mail this packet out with the G s s command.

 9. You then repeat until you die.

So you basically have a bipartite system---you use nnsoup for reading and Gnus for packing/sending these SOUP packets.

SOUP Commands
.............

These are commands for creating and manipulating SOUP packets.

G s b
     Pack all unread articles in the current group (gnus-group-brew-soup).  This command understands the process/prefix convention.

G s w
     Save all SOUP data files (gnus-soup-save-areas).

G s s
     Send all replies from the replies packet (gnus-soup-send-replies).

G s p
     Pack all files into a SOUP packet (gnus-soup-pack-packet).

G s r
     Pack all replies into a replies packet (nnsoup-pack-replies).

O s
     This summary-mode command adds the current article to a SOUP packet (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-directory
     Directory where Gnus will save intermediate files while composing SOUP packets.  The default is ~/SoupBrew/.

gnus-soup-replies-directory
     This is what Gnus will use as a temporary directory while sending our reply packets.  ~/SoupBrew/SoupReplies/ is the default.

gnus-soup-prefix-file
     Name of the file where Gnus stores the last used prefix.  The default is gnus-prefix.

gnus-soup-packer
     A format string command for packing a SOUP packet.  The default is tar cf - %s | gzip > $HOME/Soupout%d.tgz.

gnus-soup-unpacker
     Format string command for unpacking a SOUP packet.  The default is gunzip -c %s | tar xvf -.

gnus-soup-packet-directory
     Where Gnus will look for reply packets.  The default is ~/.

gnus-soup-packet-regexp
     Regular expression matching SOUP reply packets in gnus-soup-packet-directory.

SOUP Groups
...........

nnsoup is the backend 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-directory
     When nnsoup unpacks a SOUP packet, it does it in this directory.  (/tmp/ by default.)

nnsoup-directory
     nnsoup then moves each message and index file to this directory. The default is ~/SOUP/.

nnsoup-replies-directory
     All replies will stored in this directory before being packed into a reply packet.  The default is ~/SOUP/replies/".

nnsoup-replies-format-type
     The SOUP format of the replies packets.  The default is ?n (rnews), and I don't think you should touch that variable.  I probably shouldn't even have documented it.  Drats!  Too late!

nnsoup-replies-index-type
     The index type of the replies packet.  The is ?n, which means ``none''.  Don't fiddle with this one either!

nnsoup-active-file
     Where nnsoup 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-packer
     Format string command for packing a reply SOUP packet.  The default is tar cf - %s | gzip > $HOME/Soupin%d.tgz.

nnsoup-unpacker
     Format string command for unpacking incom