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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 Ma Gnus v0.12
Copyright © 1995–2015 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, with the Front-Cover Texts being “A GNU Manual”, and with the Back-Cover Texts as in (a) below. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled “GNU Free Documentation License”.
(a) The FSF’s Back-Cover Text is: “You have the freedom to copy and modify this GNU manual.”
1. Starting Gnus | Finding news can be a pain. | |
2. Group Buffer | Selecting, subscribing and killing groups. | |
3. Summary Buffer | Reading, saving and posting articles. | |
4. Article Buffer | Displaying and handling articles. | |
5. Composing Messages | Information on sending mail and news. | |
6. Select Methods | Gnus reads all messages from various select methods. | |
7. Scoring | Assigning values to articles. | |
8. Searching | Mail and News search engines. | |
9. Various | General purpose settings. | |
10. The End | Farewell and goodbye. | |
11. Appendices | Terminology, Emacs intro, FAQ, History, Internals. | |
12. GNU Free Documentation License | The license for this documentation. | |
13. Index | Variable, function and concept index. | |
14. Key Index | ||
Other related manuals | ||
---|---|---|
• Message:(message) | Composing messages. | |
• Emacs-MIME:(emacs-mime) | Composing messages; MIME-specific parts. | |
• Sieve:(sieve) | Managing Sieve scripts in Emacs. | |
• EasyPG:(epa) | PGP/MIME with Gnus. | |
• SASL:(sasl) | SASL authentication in Emacs. | |
— The Detailed Node Listing — Starting Gnus | ||
1.1 Finding the News | Choosing a method for getting news. | |
1.2 The Server is Down | How can I read my mail then? | |
1.3 Slave Gnusae | You can have more than one Gnus active at a time. | |
9.13 Fetching a Group | Starting Gnus just to read a group. | |
1.4 New Groups | What is Gnus supposed to do with new groups? | |
1.5 Changing Servers | You may want to move from one server to another. | |
1.6 Startup Files | Those pesky startup files—‘.newsrc’. | |
1.7 Auto Save | Recovering from a crash. | |
1.8 The Active File | Reading the active file over a slow line Takes Time. | |
1.9 Startup Variables | Other variables you might change. | |
New Groups | ||
1.4.1 Checking New Groups | Determining what groups are new. | |
1.4.2 Subscription Methods | What Gnus should do with new groups. | |
1.4.3 Filtering New Groups | Making Gnus ignore certain new groups. | |
Group Buffer | ||
2.1 Group Buffer Format | Information listed and how you can change it. | |
2.2 Group Maneuvering | Commands for moving in the group buffer. | |
2.3 Selecting a Group | Actually reading news. | |
2.4 Subscription Commands | Unsubscribing, killing, subscribing. | |
2.5 Group Data | Changing the info for a group. | |
2.6 Group Levels | Levels? What are those, then? | |
2.7 Group Score | A mechanism for finding out what groups you like. | |
2.8 Marking Groups | You can mark groups for later processing. | |
2.9 Foreign Groups | Creating and editing groups. | |
2.10 Group Parameters | Each group may have different parameters set. | |
2.11 Listing Groups | Gnus can list various subsets of the groups. | |
2.12 Sorting Groups | Re-arrange the group order. | |
2.13 Group Maintenance | Maintaining a tidy ‘.newsrc’ file. | |
2.14 Browse Foreign Server | You can browse a server. See what it has to offer. | |
2.15 Exiting Gnus | Stop reading news and get some work done. | |
2.16 Group Topics | A folding group mode divided into topics. | |
2.17 Accessing groups of non-English names | ||
2.18 Misc Group Stuff | Other stuff that you can to do. | |
Group Buffer Format | ||
2.1.1 Group Line Specification | Deciding how the group buffer is to look. | |
2.1.2 Group Mode Line Specification | The group buffer mode line. | |
2.1.3 Group Highlighting | Having nice colors in the group buffer. | |
Group Topics | ||
2.16.1 Topic Commands | Interactive E-Z commands. | |
2.16.2 Topic Variables | How to customize the topics the Lisp Way. | |
2.16.3 Topic Sorting | Sorting each topic individually. | |
2.16.4 Topic Topology | A map of the world. | |
2.16.5 Topic Parameters | Parameters that apply to all groups in a topic. | |
Misc Group Stuff | ||
2.18.1 Scanning New Messages | Asking Gnus to see whether new messages have arrived. | |
2.18.2 Group Information | Information and help on groups and Gnus. | |
2.18.3 Group Timestamp | Making Gnus keep track of when you last read a group. | |
2.18.4 File Commands | Reading and writing the Gnus files. | |
2.18.5 Sieve Commands | Managing Sieve scripts. | |
Summary Buffer | ||
3.1 Summary Buffer Format | Deciding how the summary buffer is to look. | |
3.2 Summary Maneuvering | Moving around the summary buffer. | |
3.3 Choosing Articles | Reading articles. | |
3.4 Scrolling the Article | Scrolling the current article. | |
3.5 Reply, Followup and Post | Posting articles. | |
3.6 Delayed Articles | Send articles at a later time. | |
3.7 Marking Articles | Marking articles as read, expirable, etc. | |
3.8 Limiting | You can limit the summary buffer. | |
3.9 Threading | How threads are made. | |
3.10 Sorting the Summary Buffer | How articles and threads are sorted. | |
3.11 Asynchronous Article Fetching | Gnus might be able to pre-fetch articles. | |
3.12 Article Caching | You may store articles in a cache. | |
3.13 Persistent Articles | Making articles expiry-resistant. | |
3.14 Sticky Articles | Article buffers that are not reused. | |
3.15 Article Backlog | Having already read articles hang around. | |
3.16 Saving Articles | Ways of customizing article saving. | |
3.17 Decoding Articles | Gnus can treat series of (uu)encoded articles. | |
3.18 Article Treatment | The article buffer can be mangled at will. | |
3.19 MIME Commands | Doing MIMEy things with the articles. | |
3.20 Charsets | Character set issues. | |
3.21 Article Commands | Doing various things with the article buffer. | |
3.22 Summary Sorting | Sorting the summary buffer in various ways. | |
3.23 Finding the Parent | No child support? Get the parent. | |
3.24 Alternative Approaches | Reading using non-default summaries. | |
3.25 Tree Display | A more visual display of threads. | |
3.26 Mail Group Commands | Some commands can only be used in mail groups. | |
3.27 Various Summary Stuff | What didn’t fit anywhere else. | |
3.28 Exiting the Summary Buffer | Returning to the Group buffer, or reselecting the current group. | |
3.29 Crosspost Handling | How crossposted articles are dealt with. | |
3.30 Duplicate Suppression | An alternative when crosspost handling fails. | |
3.31 Security | Decrypt and Verify. | |
3.32 Mailing List | Mailing list minor mode. | |
Summary Buffer Format | ||
3.1.1 Summary Buffer Lines | You can specify how summary lines should look. | |
3.1.2 To From Newsgroups | How to not display your own name. | |
3.1.3 Summary Buffer Mode Line | You can say how the mode line should look. | |
3.1.4 Summary Highlighting | Making the summary buffer all pretty and nice. | |
Choosing Articles | ||
3.3.1 Choosing Commands | Commands for choosing articles. | |
3.3.2 Choosing Variables | Variables that influence these commands. | |
Reply, Followup and Post | ||
3.5.1 Summary Mail Commands | Sending mail. | |
3.5.2 Summary Post Commands | Sending news. | |
3.5.3 Summary Message Commands | Other Message-related commands. | |
3.5.4 Canceling Articles | ||
Marking Articles | ||
3.7.1 Unread Articles | Marks for unread articles. | |
3.7.2 Read Articles | Marks for read articles. | |
3.7.3 Other Marks | Marks that do not affect readedness. | |
3.7.4 Setting Marks | How to set and remove marks. | |
3.7.5 Generic Marking Commands | How to customize the marking. | |
3.7.6 Setting Process Marks | How to mark articles for later processing. | |
Threading | ||
3.9.1 Customizing Threading | Variables you can change to affect the threading. | |
3.9.2 Thread Commands | Thread based commands in the summary buffer. | |
Customizing Threading | ||
3.9.1.1 Loose Threads | How Gnus gathers loose threads into bigger threads. | |
3.9.1.2 Filling In Threads | Making the threads displayed look fuller. | |
3.9.1.3 More Threading | Even more variables for fiddling with threads. | |
3.9.1.4 Low-Level Threading | You thought it was over… but you were wrong! | |
Decoding Articles | ||
3.17.1 Uuencoded Articles | Uudecode articles. | |
3.17.2 Shell Archives | Unshar articles. | |
3.17.3 PostScript Files | Split PostScript. | |
3.17.4 Other Files | Plain save and binhex. | |
3.17.5 Decoding Variables | Variables for a happy decoding. | |
3.17.6 Viewing Files | You want to look at the result of the decoding? | |
Decoding Variables | ||
3.17.5.1 Rule Variables | Variables that say how a file is to be viewed. | |
3.17.5.2 Other Decode Variables | Other decode variables. | |
3.17.5.3 Uuencoding and Posting | Variables for customizing uuencoding. | |
Article Treatment | ||
3.18.1 Article Highlighting | You want to make the article look like fruit salad. | |
3.18.2 Article Fontisizing | Making emphasized text look nice. | |
3.18.3 Article Hiding | You also want to make certain info go away. | |
3.18.4 Article Washing | Lots of way-neat functions to make life better. | |
3.18.5 Article Header | Doing various header transformations. | |
3.18.6 Article Buttons | Click on URLs, Message-IDs, addresses and the like. | |
3.18.7 Article button levels | Controlling appearance of buttons. | |
3.18.8 Article Date | Grumble, UT! | |
3.18.9 Article Display | Display various stuff—X-Face, Picons, Smileys, Gravatars | |
3.18.10 Article Signature | What is a signature? | |
3.18.11 Article Miscellanea | Various other stuff. | |
Alternative Approaches | ||
3.24.1 Pick and Read | First mark articles and then read them. | |
3.24.2 Binary Groups | Auto-decode all articles. | |
Various Summary Stuff | ||
3.27.1 Summary Group Information | Information oriented commands. | |
3.27.2 Searching for Articles | Multiple article commands. | |
3.27.3 Summary Generation Commands | ||
3.27.4 Really Various Summary Commands | Those pesky non-conformant commands. | |
Article Buffer | ||
4.1 Hiding Headers | Deciding what headers should be displayed. | |
4.2 Using MIME | Pushing articles through MIME before reading them. | |
4.3 HTML | Reading HTML messages. | |
4.4 Customizing Articles | Tailoring the look of the articles. | |
4.5 Article Keymap | Keystrokes available in the article buffer. | |
4.6 Misc Article | Other stuff. | |
Composing Messages | ||
5.1 Mail | Mailing and replying. | |
5.2 Posting Server | What server should you post and mail via? | |
5.3 POP before SMTP | You cannot send a mail unless you read a mail. | |
5.4 Mail and Post | Mailing and posting at the same time. | |
5.5 Archived Messages | Where Gnus stores the messages you’ve sent. | |
5.6 Posting Styles | An easier way to specify who you are. | |
5.7 Drafts | Postponing messages and rejected messages. | |
5.8 Rejected Articles | What happens if the server doesn’t like your article? | |
5.9 Signing and encrypting | How to compose secure messages. | |
Select Methods | ||
6.1 Server Buffer | Making and editing virtual servers. | |
6.2 Getting News | Reading USENET news with Gnus. | |
6.3 Using IMAP | Reading mail from IMAP. | |
6.4 Getting Mail | Reading your personal mail with Gnus. | |
6.5 Browsing the Web | Getting messages from a plethora of Web sources. | |
6.6 Other Sources | Reading directories, files. | |
6.7 Combined Groups | Combining groups into one group. | |
6.8 Email Based Diary | Using mails to manage diary events in Gnus. | |
6.9 Gnus Unplugged | Reading news and mail offline. | |
Server Buffer | ||
6.1.1 Server Buffer Format | You can customize the look of this buffer. | |
6.1.2 Server Commands | Commands to manipulate servers. | |
6.1.3 Example Methods | Examples server specifications. | |
6.1.4 Creating a Virtual Server | An example session. | |
6.1.5 Server Variables | Which variables to set. | |
6.1.6 Servers and Methods | You can use server names as select methods. | |
6.1.7 Unavailable Servers | Some servers you try to contact may be down. | |
Getting News | ||
6.2.1 NNTP | Reading news from an NNTP server. | |
6.2.2 News Spool | Reading news from the local spool. | |
NNTP | ||
6.2.1.1 Direct Functions | Connecting directly to the server. | |
6.2.1.2 Indirect Functions | Connecting indirectly to the server. | |
6.2.1.3 Common Variables | Understood by several connection functions. | |
Getting Mail | ||
6.4.1 Mail in a Newsreader | Important introductory notes. | |
6.4.2 Getting Started Reading Mail | A simple cookbook example. | |
6.4.3 Splitting Mail | How to create mail groups. | |
6.4.4 Mail Sources | How to tell Gnus where to get mail from. | |
6.4.5 Mail Back End Variables | Variables for customizing mail handling. | |
6.4.6 Fancy Mail Splitting | Gnus can do hairy splitting of incoming mail. | |
6.4.7 Group Mail Splitting | Use group customize to drive mail splitting. | |
6.4.8 Incorporating Old Mail | What about the old mail you have? | |
6.4.9 Expiring Mail | Getting rid of unwanted mail. | |
6.4.10 Washing Mail | Removing cruft from the mail you get. | |
6.4.11 Duplicates | Dealing with duplicated mail. | |
6.4.12 Not Reading Mail | Using mail back ends for reading other files. | |
6.4.13 Choosing a Mail Back End | Gnus can read a variety of mail formats. | |
Mail Sources | ||
6.4.4.1 Mail Source Specifiers | How to specify what a mail source is. | |
6.4.4.3 Mail Source Customization | Some variables that influence things. | |
6.4.4.4 Fetching Mail | Using the mail source specifiers. | |
Choosing a Mail Back End | ||
6.4.13.1 Unix Mail Box | Using the (quite) standard Un*x mbox. | |
6.4.13.2 Babyl | Babyl was used by older versions of Rmail. | |
6.4.13.3 Mail Spool | Store your mail in a private spool? | |
6.4.13.4 MH Spool | An mhspool-like back end. | |
6.4.13.5 Maildir | Another one-file-per-message format. | |
6.4.13.10 Mail Folders | Having one file for each group. | |
6.4.13.11 Comparing Mail Back Ends | An in-depth looks at pros and cons. | |
Browsing the Web | ||
6.5.1 Archiving Mail | ||
6.5.2 Web Searches | Creating groups from articles that match a string. | |
6.5.3 RSS | Reading RDF site summary. | |
Other Sources | ||
6.6.1 Directory Groups | You can read a directory as if it was a newsgroup. | |
6.6.2 Anything Groups | Dired? Who needs dired? | |
6.6.3 Document Groups | Single files can be the basis of a group. | |
6.6.4 Mail-To-News Gateways | Posting articles via mail-to-news gateways. | |
6.6.5 The Empty Backend | The backend that never has any news. | |
Document Groups | ||
6.6.3.1 Document Server Internals | How to add your own document types. | |
Combined Groups | ||
6.7.1 Virtual Groups | Combining articles from many groups. | |
Email Based Diary | ||
6.8.1 The NNDiary Back End | Basic setup and usage. | |
6.8.2 The Gnus Diary Library | Utility toolkit on top of nndiary. | |
6.8.3 Sending or Not Sending | A final note on sending diary messages. | |
The NNDiary Back End | ||
6.8.1.1 Diary Messages | What makes a message valid for nndiary. | |
6.8.1.2 Running NNDiary | NNDiary has two modes of operation. | |
6.8.1.3 Customizing NNDiary | Bells and whistles. | |
The Gnus Diary Library | ||
6.8.2.1 Diary Summary Line Format | A nicer summary buffer line format. | |
6.8.2.2 Diary Articles Sorting | A nicer way to sort messages. | |
6.8.2.3 Diary Headers Generation | Not doing it manually. | |
6.8.2.4 Diary Group Parameters | Not handling them manually. | |
Gnus Unplugged | ||
6.9.1 Agent Basics | How it all is supposed to work. | |
6.9.2 Agent Categories | How to tell the Gnus Agent what to download. | |
6.9.3 Agent Commands | New commands for all the buffers. | |
6.9.4 Agent Visuals | Ways that the agent may effect your summary buffer. | |
6.9.5 Agent as Cache | The Agent is a big cache too. | |
6.9.6 Agent Expiry | How to make old articles go away. | |
6.9.7 Agent Regeneration | How to recover from lost connections and other accidents. | |
6.9.8 Agent and flags | How the Agent maintains flags. | |
6.9.9 Agent and IMAP | How to use the Agent with IMAP. | |
6.9.10 Outgoing Messages | What happens when you post/mail something? | |
6.9.11 Agent Variables | Customizing is fun. | |
6.9.12 Example Setup | An example ‘~/.gnus.el’ file for offline people. | |
6.9.13 Batching Agents | How to fetch news from a cron job.
| |
6.9.14 Agent Caveats | What you think it’ll do and what it does. | |
Agent Categories | ||
6.9.2.1 Category Syntax | What a category looks like. | |
6.9.2.2 Category Buffer | A buffer for maintaining categories. | |
6.9.2.3 Category Variables | Customize’r’Us. | |
Agent Commands | ||
6.9.3.1 Group Agent Commands | Configure groups and fetch their contents. | |
6.9.3.2 Summary Agent Commands | Manually select then fetch specific articles. | |
6.9.3.3 Server Agent Commands | Select the servers that are supported by the agent. | |
Scoring | ||
7.1 Summary Score Commands | Adding score entries for the current group. | |
7.2 Group Score Commands | General score commands. | |
7.3 Score Variables | Customize your scoring. (My, what terminology). | |
7.4 Score File Format | What a score file may contain. | |
7.5 Score File Editing | You can edit score files by hand as well. | |
7.6 Adaptive Scoring | Big Sister Gnus knows what you read. | |
7.7 Home Score File | How to say where new score entries are to go. | |
7.8 Followups To Yourself | Having Gnus notice when people answer you. | |
7.9 Scoring On Other Headers | Scoring on non-standard headers. | |
7.10 Scoring Tips | How to score effectively. | |
7.11 Reverse Scoring | That problem child of old is not problem. | |
7.12 Global Score Files | Earth-spanning, ear-splitting score files. | |
7.13 Kill Files | They are still here, but they can be ignored. | |
7.14 Converting Kill Files | Translating kill files to score files. | |
7.15 Advanced Scoring | Using logical expressions to build score rules. | |
7.16 Score Decays | It can be useful to let scores wither away. | |
Advanced Scoring | ||
7.15.1 Advanced Scoring Syntax | A definition. | |
7.15.2 Advanced Scoring Examples | What they look like. | |
7.15.3 Advanced Scoring Tips | Getting the most out of it. | |
Searching | ||
8.1 nnir | Searching with various engines. | |
8.2 nnmairix | Searching with Mairix. | |
nnir | ||
8.1.1 What is nnir? | What does nnir do. | |
8.1.2 Basic Usage | How to perform simple searches. | |
8.1.3 Setting up nnir | How to set up nnir. | |
Setting up nnir | ||
8.1.3.1 Associating Engines | How to associate engines. | |
Various | ||
9.1 Process/Prefix | A convention used by many treatment commands. | |
9.2 Interactive | Making Gnus ask you many questions. | |
9.3 Symbolic Prefixes | How to supply some Gnus functions with options. | |
9.4 Formatting Variables | You can specify what buffers should look like. | |
9.5 Window Layout | Configuring the Gnus buffer windows. | |
9.6 Faces and Fonts | How to change how faces look. | |
9.7 Mode Lines | Displaying information in the mode lines. | |
9.8 Highlighting and Menus | Making buffers look all nice and cozy. | |
9.9 Daemons | Gnus can do things behind your back. | |
9.10 Undo | Some actions can be undone. | |
9.11 Predicate Specifiers | Specifying predicates. | |
9.12 Moderation | What to do if you’re a moderator. | |
9.14 Image Enhancements | Modern versions of Emacs/XEmacs can display images. | |
9.15 Fuzzy Matching | What’s the big fuzz? | |
9.16 Thwarting Email Spam | Simple ways to avoid unsolicited commercial email. | |
9.17 Spam Package | A package for filtering and processing spam. | |
9.18 The Gnus Registry | A package for tracking messages by Message-ID. | |
9.19 Interaction with other modes | ||
9.20 Various Various | Things that are really various. | |
Formatting Variables | ||
9.4.1 Formatting Basics | A formatting variable is basically a format string. | |
9.4.2 Mode Line Formatting | Some rules about mode line formatting variables. | |
9.4.3 Advanced Formatting | Modifying output in various ways. | |
9.4.4 User-Defined Specs | Having Gnus call your own functions. | |
9.4.5 Formatting Fonts | Making the formatting look colorful and nice. | |
9.4.6 Positioning Point | Moving point to a position after an operation. | |
9.4.7 Tabulation | Tabulating your output. | |
9.4.8 Wide Characters | Dealing with wide characters. | |
Image Enhancements | ||
9.14.1 X-Face | Display a funky, teensy black-and-white image. | |
9.14.2 Face | Display a funkier, teensier colored image. | |
9.14.3 Smileys | Show all those happy faces the way they were meant to be shown. | |
9.14.4 Picons | How to display pictures of what you’re reading. | |
9.14.5 Gravatars | Display the avatar of people you read. | |
9.14.6 Various XEmacs Variables | Other XEmacsy Gnusey variables. | |
Thwarting Email Spam | ||
9.16.1 The problem of spam | Some background, and some solutions | |
9.16.2 Anti-Spam Basics | Simple steps to reduce the amount of spam. | |
9.16.3 SpamAssassin, Vipul’s Razor, DCC, etc | How to use external anti-spam tools. | |
9.16.4 Hashcash | Reduce spam by burning CPU time. | |
Spam Package | ||
9.17.1 Spam Package Introduction | ||
9.17.2 Filtering Incoming Mail | ||
9.17.3 Detecting Spam in Groups | ||
9.17.4 Spam and Ham Processors | ||
9.17.5 Spam Package Configuration Examples | ||
9.17.6 Spam Back Ends | ||
9.17.7 Extending the Spam package | ||
9.17.8 Spam Statistics Package | ||
Spam Statistics Package | ||
9.17.8.1 Creating a spam-stat dictionary | ||
9.17.8.2 Splitting mail using spam-stat | ||
9.17.8.3 Low-level interface to the spam-stat dictionary | ||
Appendices | ||
11.1 XEmacs | Requirements for installing under XEmacs. | |
11.2 History | How Gnus got where it is today. | |
11.3 On Writing Manuals | Why this is not a beginner’s guide. | |
11.4 Terminology | We use really difficult, like, words here. | |
11.5 Customization | Tailoring Gnus to your needs. | |
11.6 Troubleshooting | What you might try if things do not work. | |
11.7 Gnus Reference Guide | Rilly, rilly technical stuff. | |
11.8 Emacs for Heathens | A short introduction to Emacsian terms. | |
11.9 Frequently Asked Questions | The Gnus FAQ | |
History | ||
11.2.1 Gnus Versions | What Gnus versions have been released. | |
11.2.2 Why? | What’s the point of Gnus? | |
11.2.3 Compatibility | Just how compatible is Gnus with GNUS? | |
11.2.4 Conformity | Gnus tries to conform to all standards. | |
11.2.5 Emacsen | Gnus can be run on a few modern Emacsen. | |
11.2.6 Gnus Development | How Gnus is developed. | |
11.2.7 Contributors | Oodles of people. | |
11.2.8 New Features | Pointers to some of the new stuff in Gnus. | |
New Features | ||
11.2.8.1 (ding) Gnus | New things in Gnus 5.0/5.1, the first new Gnus. | |
11.2.8.2 September Gnus | The Thing Formally Known As Gnus 5.2/5.3. | |
11.2.8.3 Red Gnus | Third time best—Gnus 5.4/5.5. | |
11.2.8.4 Quassia Gnus | Two times two is four, or Gnus 5.6/5.7. | |
11.2.8.5 Pterodactyl Gnus | Pentad also starts with P, AKA Gnus 5.8/5.9. | |
11.2.8.6 Oort Gnus | It’s big. It’s far out. Gnus 5.10/5.11. | |
11.2.8.7 No Gnus | Very punny. Gnus 5.12/5.13 | |
11.2.8.8 Ma Gnus | Celebrating 25 years of Gnus. | |
Customization | ||
11.5.1 Slow/Expensive Connection | You run a local Emacs and get the news elsewhere. | |
11.5.2 Slow Terminal Connection | You run a remote Emacs. | |
11.5.3 Little Disk Space | You feel that having large setup files is icky. | |
11.5.4 Slow Machine | You feel like buying a faster machine. | |
Gnus Reference Guide | ||
11.7.1 Gnus Utility Functions | Common functions and variable to use. | |
11.7.2 Back End Interface | How Gnus communicates with the servers. | |
11.7.3 Score File Syntax | A BNF definition of the score file standard. | |
11.7.4 Headers | How Gnus stores headers internally. | |
11.7.5 Ranges | A handy format for storing mucho numbers. | |
11.7.6 Group Info | The group info format. | |
11.7.7 Extended Interactive | Symbolic prefixes and stuff. | |
11.7.8 Emacs/XEmacs Code | Gnus can be run under all modern Emacsen. | |
11.7.9 Various File Formats | Formats of files that Gnus use. | |
Back End Interface | ||
11.7.2.1 Required Back End Functions | Functions that must be implemented. | |
11.7.2.2 Optional Back End Functions | Functions that need not be implemented. | |
11.7.2.3 Error Messaging | How to get messages and report errors. | |
11.7.2.4 Writing New Back Ends | Extending old back ends. | |
11.7.2.5 Hooking New Back Ends Into Gnus | What has to be done on the Gnus end. | |
11.7.2.6 Mail-like Back Ends | Some tips on mail back ends. | |
Various File Formats | ||
11.7.9.1 Active File Format | Information on articles and groups available. | |
11.7.9.2 Newsgroups File Format | Group descriptions. | |
Emacs for Heathens | ||
11.8.1 Keystrokes | Entering text and executing commands. | |
11.8.2 Emacs Lisp | The built-in Emacs programming language. | |
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If you haven’t used Emacs much before using Gnus, read Emacs for Heathens first.
If your system administrator has set things up properly, starting Gnus
and reading news is extremely easy—you just type M-x gnus in
your Emacs. If not, you should customize the variable
gnus-select-method
as described in Finding the News. For a
minimal setup for posting should also customize the variables
user-full-name
and user-mail-address
.
If you want to start Gnus in a different frame, you can use the command M-x gnus-other-frame instead.
If things do not go smoothly at startup, you have to twiddle some variables in your ‘~/.gnus.el’ file. This file is similar to ‘~/.emacs’, but is read when Gnus starts.
If you puzzle at any terms used in this manual, please refer to the terminology section (see section Terminology).
1.1 Finding the News | Choosing a method for getting news. | |
1.2 The Server is Down | How can I read my mail then? | |
1.3 Slave Gnusae | You can have more than one Gnus active at a time. | |
1.4 New Groups | What is Gnus supposed to do with new groups? | |
1.5 Changing Servers | You may want to move from one server to another. | |
1.6 Startup Files | Those pesky startup files—‘.newsrc’. | |
1.7 Auto Save | Recovering from a crash. | |
1.8 The Active File | Reading the active file over a slow line Takes Time. | |
1.9 Startup Variables | Other variables you might change. |
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First of all, you should know that there is a special buffer called ‘*Server*’ that lists all the servers Gnus knows about. You can press ^ from the Group buffer to see it. In the Server buffer, you can press RET on a defined server to see all the groups it serves (subscribed or not!). You can also add or delete servers, edit a foreign server’s definition, agentize or de-agentize a server, and do many other neat things. See section Server Buffer. See section Foreign Groups. See section Agent Basics.
The gnus-select-method
variable says where Gnus should look for
news. This variable should be a list where the first element says
how and the second element says where. This method is your
native method. All groups not fetched with this method are
secondary or foreign groups.
For instance, if the ‘news.somewhere.edu’ NNTP server is where you want to get your daily dosage of news from, you’d say:
(setq gnus-select-method '(nntp "news.somewhere.edu")) |
If you want to read directly from the local spool, say:
(setq gnus-select-method '(nnspool "")) |
If you can use a local spool, you probably should, as it will almost
certainly be much faster. But do not use the local spool if your
server is running Leafnode (which is a simple, standalone private news
server); in this case, use (nntp "localhost")
.
If this variable is not set, Gnus will take a look at the
NNTPSERVER
environment variable. If that variable isn’t set,
Gnus will see whether gnus-nntpserver-file
(‘/etc/nntpserver’ by default) has any opinions on the matter.
If that fails as well, Gnus will try to use the machine running Emacs
as an NNTP server. That’s a long shot, though.
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 section Foreign Groups.
A slightly different approach to foreign groups is to set the
gnus-secondary-select-methods
variable. The select methods
listed in this variable are in many ways just as native as the
gnus-select-method
server. They will also be queried for active
files during startup (if that’s required), and new newsgroups that
appear on these servers will be subscribed (or not) just as native
groups are.
For instance, if you use the nnmbox
back end to read your mail,
you would typically set this variable to
(setq gnus-secondary-select-methods '((nnmbox ""))) |
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If the default server is down, Gnus will understandably have some problems starting. However, if you have some mail groups in addition to the news groups, you may want to start Gnus anyway.
Gnus, being the trusting sort of program, will ask whether to proceed without a native select method if that server can’t be contacted. This will happen whether the server doesn’t actually exist (i.e., you have given the wrong address) or the server has just momentarily taken ill for some reason or other. If you decide to continue and have no foreign groups, you’ll find it difficult to actually do anything in the group buffer. But, hey, that’s your problem. Blllrph!
If you know that the server is definitely down, or you just want to read
your mail without bothering with the server at all, you can use the
gnus-no-server
command to start Gnus. That might come in handy
if you’re in a hurry as well. This command will not attempt to contact
your primary server—instead, it will just activate all groups on level
1 and 2. (You should preferably keep no native groups on those two
levels.) Also see section Group Levels.
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You might want to run more than one Emacs with more than one Gnus at the same time. If you are using different ‘.newsrc’ files (e.g., if you are using the two different Gnusae to read from two different servers), that is no problem whatsoever. You just do it.
The problem appears when you want to run two Gnusae that use the same ‘.newsrc’ file.
To work around that problem some, we here at the Think-Tank at the Gnus Towers have come up with a new concept: Masters and slaves. (We have applied for a patent on this concept, and have taken out a copyright on those words. If you wish to use those words in conjunction with each other, you have to send $1 per usage instance to me. Usage of the patent (Master/Slave Relationships In Computer Applications) will be much more expensive, of course.)
Anyway, you start one Gnus up the normal way with M-x gnus (or however you do it). Each subsequent slave Gnusae should be started with M-x gnus-slave. These slaves won’t save normal ‘.newsrc’ files, but instead save slave files that contain information only on what groups have been read in the slave session. When a master Gnus starts, it will read (and delete) these slave files, incorporating all information from them. (The slave files will be read in the sequence they were created, so the latest changes will have precedence.)
Information from the slave files has, of course, precedence over the information in the normal (i.e., master) ‘.newsrc’ file.
If the ‘.newsrc*’ files have not been saved in the master when the slave starts, you may be prompted as to whether to read an auto-save file. If you answer “yes”, the unsaved changes to the master will be incorporated into the slave. If you answer “no”, the slave may see some messages as unread that have been read in the master.
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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 section Group Maintenance). This variable
is ask-server
by default. If you set this variable to
always
, then Gnus will query the back ends for new groups even
when you do the g command (see section Scanning New Messages).
1.4.1 Checking New Groups | Determining what groups are new. | |
1.4.2 Subscription Methods | What Gnus should do with new groups. | |
1.4.3 Filtering New Groups | Making Gnus ignore certain new groups. |
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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 (see section Group Levels) 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.
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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 (see section Group Levels). 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 in arbitrary order. This really means that all new groups will be added at “the top” of the group buffer.
gnus-subscribe-alphabetically
Subscribe all new groups in alphabetical order.
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 its
hierarchy. So if you want to have the ‘rec’ hierarchy before the
‘comp’ hierarchy, this function will not mess that configuration
up. Or something like that.
gnus-subscribe-interactively
Subscribe new groups interactively. This means that Gnus will ask you about all new groups. The groups you choose to subscribe to will be subscribed hierarchically.
gnus-subscribe-killed
Kill all new groups.
gnus-subscribe-topics
Put the groups into the topic that has a matching subscribe
topic
parameter (see section Topic Parameters). For instance, a subscribe
topic parameter that looks like
"nnml" |
will mean that all groups that match that regex will be subscribed under that topic.
If no topics match the groups, the groups will be subscribed in the top-level topic.
A closely related variable is
gnus-subscribe-hierarchical-interactive
. (That’s quite a
mouthful.) If this variable is non-nil
, Gnus will ask you in a
hierarchical fashion whether to subscribe to new groups or not. Gnus
will ask you for each sub-hierarchy whether you want to descend the
hierarchy or not.
One common mistake is to set the variable a few paragraphs above
(gnus-subscribe-newsgroup-method
) to
gnus-subscribe-hierarchical-interactive
. This is an error. This
will not work. This is ga-ga. So don’t do it.
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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
.
The “options -n” format is very simplistic. The syntax above is all that is supports: you can force-subscribe hierarchies, or you can deny hierarchies, and that’s it.
If you don’t want to mess with your ‘.newsrc’ file, you can just
set the two variables gnus-options-subscribe
and
gnus-options-not-subscribe
. These two variables do exactly the
same as the ‘.newsrc’ ‘options -n’ trick. Both are regexps,
and if the new group matches the former, it will be unconditionally
subscribed, and if it matches the latter, it will be ignored.
Yet another variable that meddles here is
gnus-auto-subscribed-groups
. It works exactly like
gnus-options-subscribe
, and is therefore really superfluous,
but I thought it would be nice to have two of these. This variable is
more meant for setting some ground rules, while the other variable is
used more for user fiddling. By default this variable makes all new
groups that come from mail back ends (nnml
, nnbabyl
,
nnfolder
, nnmbox
, nnmh
, nnimap
, and
nnmaildir
) subscribed. If you don’t like that, just set this
variable to nil
.
As if that wasn’t enough, gnus-auto-subscribed-categories
also
allows you to specify that new groups should be subscribed based on the
category their select methods belong to. The default is ‘(mail
post-mail)’, meaning that all new groups from mail-like backends
should be subscribed automatically.
New groups that match these variables are subscribed using
gnus-subscribe-options-newsgroup-method
.
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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.
You can use the M-x gnus-group-clear-data-on-native-groups command to clear out all data that you have on your native groups. Use with caution.
Clear the data from the current group only—nix out marks and the
list of read articles (gnus-group-clear-data
).
After changing servers, you must move the cache hierarchy away,
since the cached articles will have wrong article numbers, which will
affect which articles Gnus thinks are read.
gnus-group-clear-data-on-native-groups
will ask you if you want
to have it done automatically; for gnus-group-clear-data
, you
can use M-x gnus-cache-move-cache (but beware, it will move the
cache for all groups).
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Most common Unix news readers use a shared startup file called ‘.newsrc’. This file contains all the information about what groups are subscribed, and which articles in these groups have been read.
Things got a bit more complicated with GNUS. In addition to keeping the ‘.newsrc’ file updated, it also used a file called ‘.newsrc.el’ for storing all the information that didn’t fit into the ‘.newsrc’ file. (Actually, it also duplicated everything in the ‘.newsrc’ file.) GNUS would read whichever one of these files was the most recently saved, which enabled people to swap between GNUS and other newsreaders.
That was kinda silly, so Gnus went one better: In addition to the ‘.newsrc’ and ‘.newsrc.el’ files, Gnus also has a file called ‘.newsrc.eld’. It will read whichever of these files that are most recent, but it will never write a ‘.newsrc.el’ file. You should never delete the ‘.newsrc.eld’ file—it contains much information not stored in the ‘.newsrc’ file.
You can turn off writing the ‘.newsrc’ file by setting
gnus-save-newsrc-file
to nil
, which means you can delete
the file and save some space, as well as exiting from Gnus faster.
However, this will make it impossible to use other newsreaders than
Gnus. But hey, who would want to, right? Similarly, setting
gnus-read-newsrc-file
to nil
makes Gnus ignore the
‘.newsrc’ file and any ‘.newsrc-SERVER’ files, which can be
convenient if you use a different news reader occasionally, and you
want to read a different subset of the available groups with that
news reader.
If gnus-save-killed-list
(default t
) is nil
, Gnus
will not save the list of killed groups to the startup file. This will
save both time (when starting and quitting) and space (on disk). It
will also mean that Gnus has no record of what groups are new or old,
so the automatic new groups subscription methods become meaningless.
You should always set gnus-check-new-newsgroups
to nil
or
ask-server
if you set this variable to nil
(see section New Groups). This variable can also be a regular expression. If that’s
the case, remove all groups that do not match this regexp before
saving. This can be useful in certain obscure situations that involve
several servers where not all servers support ask-server
.
The gnus-startup-file
variable says where the startup files are.
The default value is ‘~/.newsrc’, with the Gnus (El Dingo) startup
file being whatever that one is, with a ‘.eld’ appended.
If you want to keep multiple numbered backups of this file, set
gnus-backup-startup-file
. It respects the same values as the
version-control
variable.
gnus-save-newsrc-hook
is called before saving any of the newsrc
files, while gnus-save-quick-newsrc-hook
is called just before
saving the ‘.newsrc.eld’ file, and
gnus-save-standard-newsrc-hook
is called just before saving the
‘.newsrc’ file. The latter two are commonly used to turn version
control on or off. Version control is on by default when saving the
startup files. If you want to turn backup creation off, say something like:
(defun turn-off-backup () (set (make-local-variable 'backup-inhibited) t)) (add-hook 'gnus-save-quick-newsrc-hook 'turn-off-backup) (add-hook 'gnus-save-standard-newsrc-hook 'turn-off-backup) |
When Gnus starts, it will read the gnus-site-init-file
(‘.../site-lisp/gnus-init’ by default) and gnus-init-file
(‘~/.gnus’ by default) files. These are normal Emacs Lisp files
and can be used to avoid cluttering your ‘~/.emacs’ and
‘site-init’ files with Gnus stuff. Gnus will also check for files
with the same names as these, but with ‘.elc’ and ‘.el’
suffixes. In other words, if you have set gnus-init-file
to
‘~/.gnus’, it will look for ‘~/.gnus.elc’, ‘~/.gnus.el’,
and finally ‘~/.gnus’ (in this order). If Emacs was invoked with
the ‘-q’ or ‘--no-init-file’ options (see (emacs)Initial Options section ‘Initial Options’ in The Emacs Manual), Gnus doesn’t read
gnus-init-file
.
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Whenever you do something that changes the Gnus data (reading articles, catching up, killing/subscribing groups), the change is added to a special dribble buffer. This buffer is auto-saved the normal Emacs way. If your Emacs should crash before you have saved the ‘.newsrc’ files, all changes you have made can be recovered from this file.
If Gnus detects this file at startup, it will ask the user whether to read it. The auto save file is deleted whenever the real startup file is saved.
If gnus-use-dribble-file
is nil
, Gnus won’t create and
maintain a dribble buffer. The default is t
.
Gnus will put the dribble file(s) in gnus-dribble-directory
. If
this variable is nil
, which it is by default, Gnus will dribble
into the directory where the ‘.newsrc’ file is located. (This is
normally the user’s home directory.) The dribble file will get the same
file permissions as the ‘.newsrc’ file.
If gnus-always-read-dribble-file
is non-nil
, Gnus will
read the dribble file on startup without querying the user.
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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 section New Groups for an overview of other variables that can be used instead.
The active file can be rather Huge, so if you have a slow network, you
can set gnus-read-active-file
to nil
to prevent Gnus from
reading the active file. This variable is some
by default.
Gnus will try to make do by getting information just on the groups that you actually subscribe to.
Note that if you subscribe to lots and lots of groups, setting this
variable to nil
will probably make Gnus slower, not faster. At
present, having this variable nil
will slow Gnus down
considerably, unless you read news over a 2400 baud modem.
This variable can also have the value some
. Gnus will then
attempt to read active info only on the subscribed groups. On some
servers this is quite fast (on sparkling, brand new INN servers that
support the LIST ACTIVE group
command), on others this isn’t fast
at all. In any case, some
should be faster than nil
, and
is certainly faster than t
over slow lines.
Some news servers (old versions of Leafnode and old versions of INN, for
instance) do not support the LIST ACTIVE group
. For these
servers, nil
is probably the most efficient value for this
variable.
If this variable is nil
, Gnus will ask for group info in total
lock-step, which isn’t very fast. If it is some
and you use an
NNTP server, Gnus will pump out commands as fast as it can, and
read all the replies in one swoop. This will normally result in better
performance, but if the server does not support the aforementioned
LIST ACTIVE group
command, this isn’t very nice to the server.
If you think that starting up Gnus takes too long, try all the three different values for this variable and see what works best for you.
In any case, if you use some
or nil
, you should definitely
kill all groups that you aren’t interested in to speed things up.
Note that this variable also affects active file retrieval from secondary select methods.
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gnus-load-hook
A hook 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-before-startup-hook
A hook called as the first thing when Gnus is started.
gnus-before-resume-hook
A hook called as the first thing when Gnus is resumed after a suspend.
gnus-startup-hook
A hook run as the very last thing after starting up Gnus
gnus-started-hook
A hook that is run as the very last thing after starting up Gnus successfully.
gnus-setup-news-hook
A hook that is run after reading the ‘.newsrc’ file(s), but before generating the group buffer.
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 section 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-use-backend-marks
If non-nil
, Gnus will store article marks both in the
‘.newsrc.eld’ file and in the backends. This will slow down
group operation some.
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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.
2.1 Group Buffer Format | Information listed and how you can change it. | |
2.2 Group Maneuvering | Commands for moving in the group buffer. | |
2.3 Selecting a Group | Actually reading news. | |
2.4 Subscription Commands | Unsubscribing, killing, subscribing. | |
2.5 Group Data | Changing the info for a group. | |
2.6 Group Levels | Levels? What are those, then? | |
2.7 Group Score | A mechanism for finding out what groups you like. | |
2.8 Marking Groups | You can mark groups for later processing. | |
2.9 Foreign Groups | Creating and editing groups. | |
2.10 Group Parameters | Each group may have different parameters set. | |
2.11 Listing Groups | Gnus can list various subsets of the groups. | |
2.12 Sorting Groups | Re-arrange the group order. | |
2.13 Group Maintenance | Maintaining a tidy ‘.newsrc’ file. | |
2.14 Browse Foreign Server | You can browse a server. See what it has to offer. | |
2.15 Exiting Gnus | Stop reading news and get some work done. | |
2.16 Group Topics | A folding group mode divided into topics. | |
2.17 Accessing groups of non-English names | ||
2.18 Misc Group Stuff | Other stuff that you can to do. |
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2.1.1 Group Line Specification | Deciding how the group buffer is to look. | |
2.1.2 Group Mode Line Specification | The group buffer mode line. | |
2.1.3 Group Highlighting | Having nice colors in the group buffer. |
You can customize the Group Mode tool bar, see M-x customize-apropos RET gnus-group-tool-bar. This feature is only available in Emacs.
The tool bar icons are now (de)activated correctly depending on the
cursor position. Therefore, moving around in the Group Buffer is
slower. You can disable this via the variable
gnus-group-update-tool-bar
. Its default value depends on your
Emacs version.
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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 section Formatting Variables.
‘%M%S%5y:%B%(%g%)\n’ is the value that produced those lines above.
There should always be a colon on the line; the cursor always moves to the colon after performing an operation. See section Positioning Point. Nothing else is required—not even the group name. All displayed text is just window dressing, and is never examined by Gnus. Gnus stores all real information it needs using text properties.
(Note that if you make a really strange, wonderful, spreadsheet-like layout, everybody will believe you are hard at work with the accounting instead of wasting time reading news.)
Here’s a list of all available format characters:
An asterisk if the group only has marked articles.
Whether the group is subscribed.
Level of subscribedness.
Number of unread articles.
Number of dormant articles.
Number of ticked articles.
Number of read articles.
Number of unseen articles.
Estimated total number of articles. (This is really max-number minus min-number plus 1.)
Gnus uses this estimation because the NNTP protocol provides efficient access to max-number and min-number but getting the true unread message count is not possible efficiently. For hysterical raisins, even the mail back ends, where the true number of unread messages might be available efficiently, use the same limited interface. To remove this restriction from Gnus means that the back end interface has to be changed, which is not an easy job.
The nnml backend (see section Mail Spool) has a feature called “group compaction” which circumvents this deficiency: the idea is to renumber all articles from 1, removing all gaps between numbers, hence getting a correct total count. Other backends may support this in the future. In order to keep your total article count relatively up to date, you might want to compact your groups (or even directly your server) from time to time. See section Misc Group Stuff, See section Server Commands.
Number of unread, unticked, non-dormant articles.
Number of ticked and dormant articles.
Full group name.
Group name.
Group comment (see section Group Parameters) or group name if there is no comment element in the group parameters.
Newsgroup description. You need to read the group descriptions
before these will appear, and to do that, you either have to set
gnus-read-active-file
or use the group buffer M-d
command.
‘m’ if moderated.
‘(m)’ if moderated.
Select method.
If the summary buffer for the group is open or not.
Select from where.
A string that looks like ‘<%s:%n>’ if a foreign select method is used.
Indentation based on the level of the topic (see section Group Topics).
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.e.gnus’.
‘%’ (gnus-new-mail-mark
) if there has arrived new mail to
the group lately.
‘#’ (gnus-process-mark
) if the group is process marked.
A string that says when you last read the group (see section Group Timestamp).
The disk space used by the articles fetched by both the cache and agent. The value is automatically scaled to bytes(B), kilobytes(K), megabytes(M), or gigabytes(G) to minimize the column width. A format of %7F is sufficient for a fixed-width column.
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.
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The mode line can be changed by setting
gnus-group-mode-line-format
(see section Mode Line Formatting). It
doesn’t understand that many format specifiers:
The native news server.
The native select method.
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Highlighting in the group buffer is controlled by the
gnus-group-highlight
variable. This is an alist with elements
that look like (form . face)
. If form evaluates to
something non-nil
, the face will be used on the line.
Here’s an example value for this variable that might look nice if the background is dark:
(cond (window-system (setq custom-background-mode 'light) (defface my-group-face-1 '((t (:foreground "Red" :bold t))) "First group face") (defface my-group-face-2 '((t (:foreground "DarkSeaGreen4" :bold t))) "Second group face") (defface my-group-face-3 '((t (:foreground "Green4" :bold t))) "Third group face") (defface my-group-face-4 '((t (:foreground "SteelBlue" :bold t))) "Fourth group face") (defface my-group-face-5 '((t (:foreground "Blue" :bold t))) "Fifth group face"))) (setq gnus-group-highlight '(((> unread 200) . my-group-face-1) ((and (< level 3) (zerop unread)) . my-group-face-2) ((< level 3) . my-group-face-3) ((zerop unread) . my-group-face-4) (t . my-group-face-5))) |
Also see section Faces and Fonts.
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 plus one.
topic
When using the topic minor mode, this variable is bound to the current topic being inserted.
When the forms are eval
ed, 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
.
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All movement commands understand the numeric prefix and will behave as expected, hopefully.
Go to the next group that has unread articles
(gnus-group-next-unread-group
).
Go to the previous group that has unread articles
(gnus-group-prev-unread-group
).
Go to the next group (gnus-group-next-group
).
Go to the previous group (gnus-group-prev-group
).
Go to the next unread group on the same (or lower) level
(gnus-group-next-unread-group-same-level
).
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:
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
.
If gnus-summary-next-group-on-exit
is t
, when a summary is
exited, the point in the group buffer is moved to the next unread group.
Otherwise, the point is set to the group just exited. The default is
t
.
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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.
Thus, SPC enters the group normally, C-u SPC offers old articles, C-u 4 2 SPC fetches the 42 newest articles, and C-u - 4 2 SPC fetches the 42 oldest ones.
When you are in the group (in the Summary buffer), you can type M-g to fetch new articles, or C-u M-g to also show the old ones.
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.
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,
which is useful if you want to toggle threading before generating the
summary buffer (see section Summary Generation Commands).
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
).
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. If it is nil
, no groups are
considered big. The default value is 200. If the group has more
(unread and/or ticked) articles than this, Gnus will query the user
before entering the group. The user can then specify how many
articles should be fetched from the server. If the user specifies a
negative number (-n), the n oldest articles will be
fetched. If it is positive, the n articles that have arrived
most recently will be fetched.
gnus-large-ephemeral-newsgroup
is the same as
gnus-large-newsgroup
, but is only used for ephemeral
newsgroups.
In groups in some news servers, there might be a big gap between a few
very old articles that will never be expired and the recent ones. In
such a case, the server will return the data like (1 . 30000000)
for the LIST ACTIVE group
command, for example. Even if there
are actually only the articles 1–10 and 29999900–30000000, Gnus doesn’t
know it at first and prepares for getting 30000000 articles. However,
it will consume hundreds megabytes of memories and might make Emacs get
stuck as the case may be. If you use such news servers, set the
variable gnus-newsgroup-maximum-articles
to a positive number.
The value means that Gnus ignores articles other than this number of the
latest ones in every group. For instance, the value 10000 makes Gnus
get only the articles 29990001–30000000 (if the latest article number is
30000000 in a group). Note that setting this variable to a number might
prevent you from reading very old articles. The default value of the
variable gnus-newsgroup-maximum-articles
is nil
, which
means Gnus never ignores old articles.
If gnus-auto-select-first
is non-nil
, select an article
automatically when entering a group with the SPACE command.
Which article this is controlled by the
gnus-auto-select-subject
variable. Valid values for this
variable are:
unread
Place point on the subject line of the first unread article.
first
Place point on the subject line of the first article.
unseen
Place point on the subject line of the first unseen article.
unseen-or-unread
Place point on the subject line of the first unseen article, and if there is no such article, place point on the subject line of the first unread article.
best
Place point on the subject line of the highest-scored unread article.
This variable can also be a function. In that case, that function will be called to place point on a subject line.
If you want to prevent automatic selection in some group (say, in a
binary group with Huge articles) you can set the
gnus-auto-select-first
variable to nil
in
gnus-select-group-hook
, which is called when a group is
selected.
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The following commands allow for managing your subscriptions in the Group buffer. If you want to subscribe to many groups, it’s probably more convenient to go to the Server Buffer, and choose the server there using RET or SPC. Then you’ll have the commands listed in Browse Foreign Server at hand.
Toggle subscription to the current group
(gnus-group-unsubscribe-current-group
).
Prompt for a group to subscribe, and then subscribe it. If it was
subscribed already, unsubscribe it instead
(gnus-group-unsubscribe-group
).
Kill the current group (gnus-group-kill-group
).
Yank the last killed group (gnus-group-yank-group
).
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.
Kill all groups in the region (gnus-group-kill-region
).
Kill all zombie groups (gnus-group-kill-all-zombies
).
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 section Group Levels.
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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.
Mark all articles in this group, even the ticked ones, as read
(gnus-group-catchup-current-all
).
Clear the data from the current group—nix out marks and the list of
read articles (gnus-group-clear-data
).
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.
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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 section Listing Groups), or to just check for new articles in groups on a given level or lower (see section Scanning New Messages).
Remember: The higher the level of the group, the less important it is.
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 from levels 1 to
gnus-level-subscribed
(inclusive) (default 5) to be subscribed,
gnus-level-subscribed
(exclusive) and
gnus-level-unsubscribed
(inclusive) (default 7) to be
unsubscribed, gnus-level-zombie
to be zombies (walking dead)
(default 8) and gnus-level-killed
to be killed (completely dead)
(default 9). Gnus treats subscribed and unsubscribed groups exactly the
same, but zombie and killed groups store no information on what articles
you have read, etc. This distinction between dead and living
groups isn’t done because it is nice or clever, it is done purely for
reasons of efficiency.
It is recommended that you keep all your mail groups (if any) on quite low levels (e.g., 1 or 2).
Maybe the following description of the default behavior of Gnus helps to understand what these levels are all about. By default, Gnus shows you subscribed nonempty groups, but by hitting L you can have it show empty subscribed groups and unsubscribed groups, too. Type l to go back to showing nonempty subscribed groups again. Thus, unsubscribed groups are hidden, in a way.
Zombie and killed groups are similar to unsubscribed groups in that they are hidden by default. But they are different from subscribed and unsubscribed groups in that Gnus doesn’t ask the news server for information (number of messages, number of unread messages) on zombie and killed groups. Normally, you use C-k to kill the groups you aren’t interested in. If most groups are killed, Gnus is faster.
Why does Gnus distinguish between zombie and killed groups? Well, when a new group arrives on the server, Gnus by default makes it a zombie group. This means that you are normally not bothered with new groups, but you can type A z to get a list of all new groups. Subscribe the ones you like and kill the ones you don’t want. (A k shows a list of killed groups.)
If you want to play with the level variables, you should show some care. Set them once, and don’t touch them ever again. Better yet, don’t touch them at all unless you know exactly what you’re doing.
Two closely related variables are gnus-level-default-subscribed
(default 3) and gnus-level-default-unsubscribed
(default 6),
which are the levels that new groups will be put on if they are
(un)subscribed. These two variables should, of course, be inside the
relevant valid ranges.
If gnus-keep-same-level
is non-nil
, some movement commands
will only move to groups of the same level (or lower). In
particular, going from the last article in one group to the next group
will go to the next group of the same level (or lower). This might be
handy if you want to read the most important groups before you read the
rest.
If this variable is best
, Gnus will make the next newsgroup the
one with the best level.
All groups with a level less than or equal to
gnus-group-default-list-level
will be listed in the group buffer
by default.
This variable can also be a function. In that case, that function will
be called and the result will be used as value.
If gnus-group-list-inactive-groups
is non-nil
, non-active
groups will be listed along with the unread groups. This variable is
t
by default. If it is nil
, inactive groups won’t be
listed.
If gnus-group-use-permanent-levels
is non-nil
, once you
give a level prefix to g or l, all subsequent commands will
use this level as the “work” level.
Gnus will normally just activate (i.e., query the server about) groups
on level gnus-activate-level
or less. If you don’t want to
activate unsubscribed groups, for instance, you might set this variable
to 5. The default is 6.
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You would normally keep important groups on high levels, but that scheme is somewhat restrictive. Don’t you wish you could have Gnus sort the group buffer according to how often you read groups, perhaps? Within reason?
This is what group score is for. You can have Gnus assign a score to each group through the mechanism described below. You can then sort the group buffer based on this score. Alternatively, you can sort on score and then level. (Taken together, the level and the score is called the rank of the group. A group that is on level 4 and has a score of 1 has a higher rank than a group on level 5 that has a score of 300. (The level is the most significant part and the score is the least significant part.))
If you want groups you read often to get higher scores than groups you
read seldom you can add the gnus-summary-bubble-group
function to
the gnus-summary-exit-hook
hook. This will result (after
sorting) in a bubbling sort of action. If you want to see that in
action after each summary exit, you can add
gnus-group-sort-groups-by-rank
or
gnus-group-sort-groups-by-score
to the same hook, but that will
slow things down somewhat.
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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.
Set the mark on the current group (gnus-group-mark-group
).
Remove the mark from the current group
(gnus-group-unmark-group
).
Remove the mark from all groups (gnus-group-unmark-all-groups
).
Mark all groups between point and mark (gnus-group-mark-region
).
Mark all groups in the buffer (gnus-group-mark-buffer
).
Mark all groups that match some regular expression
(gnus-group-mark-regexp
).
Also see section 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.
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If you recall how to subscribe to servers (see section Finding the News)
you will remember that gnus-secondary-select-methods
and
gnus-select-method
let you write a definition in Emacs Lisp of
what servers you want to see when you start up. The alternate
approach is to use foreign servers and groups. “Foreign” here means
they are not coming from the select methods. All foreign server
configuration and subscriptions are stored only in the
‘~/.newsrc.eld’ file.
Below are some group mode commands for making and editing general foreign
groups, as well as commands to ease the creation of a few
special-purpose groups. All these commands insert the newly created
groups under point—gnus-subscribe-newsgroup-method
is not
consulted.
Changes from the group editing commands are stored in
‘~/.newsrc.eld’ (gnus-startup-file
). An alternative is the
variable gnus-parameters
, See section Group Parameters.
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 section Browse Foreign Server).
Make an ephemeral group (gnus-group-read-ephemeral-group
). Gnus
will prompt you for a name, a method and an address.
Rename the current group to something else
(gnus-group-rename-group
). This is valid only on some
groups—mail groups mostly. This command might very well be quite slow
on some back ends.
Customize the group parameters (gnus-group-customize
).
Enter a buffer where you can edit the select method of the current
group (gnus-group-edit-group-method
).
Enter a buffer where you can edit the group parameters
(gnus-group-edit-group-parameters
).
Enter a buffer where you can edit the group info
(gnus-group-edit-group
).
Make a directory group (see section Directory Groups). You will be prompted
for a directory name (gnus-group-make-directory-group
).
Make the Gnus help group (gnus-group-make-help-group
).
Read an arbitrary directory as if it were a newsgroup with the
nneething
back end (gnus-group-enter-directory
).
See section Anything Groups.
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 mbox
, babyl
,
digest
, news
, rnews
, mmdf
, forward
,
rfc934
, rfc822-forward
, mime-parts
,
standard-digest
, slack-digest
, clari-briefs
,
nsmail
, outlook
, oe-dbx
, and mailman
. If
you run this command without a prefix, Gnus will guess at the file
type. See section Document Groups.
Create one of the groups mentioned in gnus-useful-groups
(gnus-group-make-useful-group
).
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. Valid search engine types
include google
, dejanews
, and gmane
.
See section Web Searches.
If you use the google
search engine, you can limit the search
to a particular group by using a match string like
‘shaving group:alt.sysadmin.recovery’.
Make a group based on an RSS feed
(gnus-group-make-rss-group
). You will be prompted for an URL.
See section RSS.
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. This command can’t be used on
read-only groups (like nntp
groups), though.
Make a new, fresh, empty nnvirtual
group
(gnus-group-make-empty-virtual
). See section Virtual Groups.
Add the current group to an nnvirtual
group
(gnus-group-add-to-virtual
). Uses the process/prefix convention.
See section Select Methods, for more information on the various select methods.
If gnus-activate-foreign-newsgroups
is a positive number,
Gnus will check all foreign groups with this level or lower at startup.
This might take quite a while, especially if you subscribe to lots of
groups from different NNTP servers. Also see section Group Levels;
gnus-activate-level
also affects activation of foreign
newsgroups.
The following commands create ephemeral groups. They can be called not only from the Group buffer, but in any Gnus buffer.
gnus-read-ephemeral-gmane-group
Read an ephemeral group on Gmane.org. The articles are downloaded via
HTTP using the URL specified by gnus-gmane-group-download-format
.
Gnus will prompt you for a group name, the start article number and an
the article range.
gnus-read-ephemeral-gmane-group-url
This command is similar to gnus-read-ephemeral-gmane-group
, but
the group name and the article number and range are constructed from a
given URL. Supported URL formats include:
<http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.foo.bar/12300/focus=12399
>,
<http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.foo.bar/12345/
>,
<http://article.gmane.org/gmane.foo.bar/12345/
>,
<http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.foo.bar/12345/
>, and
<http://news.gmane.org/group/gmane.foo.bar/thread=12345
>.
gnus-read-ephemeral-emacs-bug-group
Read an Emacs bug report in an ephemeral group. Gnus will prompt for a
bug number. The default is the number at point. The URL is
specified in gnus-bug-group-download-format-alist
.
gnus-read-ephemeral-debian-bug-group
Read a Debian bug report in an ephemeral group. Analog to
gnus-read-ephemeral-emacs-bug-group
.
Some of these command are also useful for article buttons, See section Article Buttons.
Here is an example:
(require 'gnus-art) (add-to-list 'gnus-button-alist '("#\\([0-9]+\\)\\>" 1 (string-match "\\<emacs\\>" (or gnus-newsgroup-name "")) gnus-read-ephemeral-emacs-bug-group 1)) |
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The group parameters store information local to a particular group.
Use the G p or the G c command to edit group parameters of a
group. (G p presents you with a Lisp-based interface, G c
presents you with a Customize-like interface. The latter helps avoid
silly Lisp errors.) You might also be interested in reading about topic
parameters (see section Topic Parameters).
Additionally, you can set group parameters via the
gnus-parameters
variable, see below.
Here’s an example group parameter list:
((to-address . "ding@gnus.org") (auto-expire . t)) |
We see that each element consists of a “dotted pair”—the thing before the dot is the key, while the thing after the dot is the value. All the parameters have this form except local variable specs, which are not dotted pairs, but proper lists.
Some parameters have correspondent customizable variables, each of which is an alist of regexps and values.
The following group parameters can be used:
to-address
Address used by when doing followups and new posts.
(to-address . "some@where.com") |
This is primarily useful in mail groups that represent closed mailing lists—mailing lists where it’s expected that everybody that writes to the mailing list is subscribed to it. Since using this parameter ensures that the mail only goes to the mailing list itself, it means that members won’t receive two copies of your followups.
Using to-address
will actually work whether the group is foreign
or not. Let’s say there’s a group on the server that is called
‘fa.4ad-l’. This is a real newsgroup, but the server has gotten
the articles from a mail-to-news gateway. Posting directly to this
group is therefore impossible—you have to send mail to the mailing
list address instead.
See also gnus-parameter-to-address-alist
.
to-list
Address used when doing a in that group.
(to-list . "some@where.com") |
It is totally ignored when doing a followup—except that if it is present in a news group, you’ll get mail group semantics when doing f.
If you do an a command in a mail group and you have neither a
to-list
group parameter nor a to-address
group parameter,
then a to-list
group parameter will be added automatically upon
sending the message if gnus-add-to-list
is set to t
.
If this variable is set, gnus-mailing-list-mode
is turned on when
entering summary buffer.
See also gnus-parameter-to-list-alist
.
subscribed
If this parameter is set to t
, Gnus will consider the
to-address and to-list parameters for this group as addresses of
mailing lists you are subscribed to. Giving Gnus this information is
(only) a first step in getting it to generate correct Mail-Followup-To
headers for your posts to these lists. The second step is to put the
following in your ‘.gnus.el’
(setq message-subscribed-address-functions '(gnus-find-subscribed-addresses)) |
See (message)Mailing Lists section ‘Mailing Lists’ in The Message Manual, for a complete treatment of available MFT support.
visible
If the group parameter list has the element (visible . t)
,
that group will always be visible in the Group buffer, regardless
of whether it has any unread articles.
This parameter cannot be set via gnus-parameters
. See
gnus-permanently-visible-groups
as an alternative.
broken-reply-to
Elements like (broken-reply-to . t)
signals that Reply-To
headers in this group are to be ignored, and for the header to be hidden
if reply-to
is part of gnus-boring-article-headers
. This
can be useful if you’re reading a mailing list group where the listserv
has inserted Reply-To
headers that point back to the listserv
itself. That is broken behavior. So there!
to-group
Elements like (to-group . "some.group.name")
means that all
posts in that group will be sent to some.group.name
.
newsgroup
If you have (newsgroup . t)
in the group parameter list, Gnus
will treat all responses as if they were responses to news articles.
This can be useful if you have a mail group that’s really a mirror of a
news group.
gcc-self
If (gcc-self . t)
is present in the group parameter list, newly
composed messages will be gcc
d to the current group. If
(gcc-self . none)
is present, no Gcc:
header will be
generated, if (gcc-self . "group")
is present, this string will
be inserted literally as a Gcc:
header. It should be a group
name. The gcc-self
value may also be a list of strings and
t
, e.g., (gcc-self "group1" "group2" t)
means to
gcc
the newly composed message into the groups "group1"
and "group2"
, and into the current group. The gcc-self
parameter takes precedence over any default Gcc
rules as
described later (see section Archived Messages), with the exception for
messages to resend.
Caveat: Adding (gcc-self . t)
to the parameter list of
nntp
groups (or the like) isn’t valid. An nntp
server
doesn’t accept articles.
auto-expire
If the group parameter has an element that looks like (auto-expire
. t)
, all articles read will be marked as expirable. For an
alternative approach, see section Expiring Mail.
See also gnus-auto-expirable-newsgroups
.
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. Unread, ticked and dormant articles are not eligible for
expiry.
See also gnus-total-expirable-newsgroups
.
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
(see section Expiring Mail) when expiring expirable messages. The value
can either be a number of days (not necessarily an integer) or the
symbols never
or immediate
.
expiry-target
Where expired messages end up. This parameter overrides
nnmail-expiry-target
.
score-file
Elements that look like (score-file . "file")
will make
‘file’ into the current score file for the group in question. All
interactive score entries will be put into this file.
adapt-file
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 from 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)
say which articles to
display on entering the group. Valid values are:
all
Display all articles, both read and unread.
an integer
Display the last integer articles in the group. This is the same as entering the group with C-u integer.
default
Display the default visible articles, which normally includes unread and ticked articles.
an array
Display articles that satisfy a predicate.
Here are some examples:
[unread]
Display only unread articles.
[not expire]
Display everything except expirable articles.
[and (not reply) (not expire)]
Display everything except expirable and articles you’ve already responded to.
The available operators are not
, and
and or
.
Predicates include tick
, unsend
, undownload
,
unread
, dormant
, expire
, reply
,
killed
, bookmark
, score
, save
,
cache
, forward
, and unseen
.
The display
parameter works by limiting the summary buffer to
the subset specified. You can pop the limit by using the / w
command (see section Limiting).
comment
Elements that look like (comment . "This is a comment")
are
arbitrary comments on the group. You can display comments in the
group line (see section Group Line Specification).
charset
Elements that look like (charset . iso-8859-1)
will make
iso-8859-1
the default charset; that is, the charset that will be
used for all articles that do not specify a charset.
See also gnus-group-charset-alist
.
ignored-charsets
Elements that look like (ignored-charsets x-unknown iso-8859-1)
will make iso-8859-1
and x-unknown
ignored; that is, the
default charset will be used for decoding articles.
See also gnus-group-ignored-charsets-alist
.
posting-style
You can store additional posting style information for this group
here (see section Posting Styles). The format is that of an entry in the
gnus-posting-styles
alist, except that there’s no regexp matching
the group name (of course). Style elements in this group parameter will
take precedence over the ones found in gnus-posting-styles
.
For instance, if you want a funky name and signature in this group only,
instead of hacking gnus-posting-styles
, you could put something
like this in the group parameters:
(posting-style (name "Funky Name") ("X-Message-SMTP-Method" "smtp smtp.example.org 587") ("X-My-Header" "Funky Value") (signature "Funky Signature")) |
If you’re using topics to organize your group buffer (see section Group Topics), note that posting styles can also be set in the topics parameters. Posting styles in topic parameters apply to all groups in this topic. More precisely, the posting-style settings for a group result from the hierarchical merging of all posting-style entries in the parameters of this group and all the topics it belongs to.
post-method
If it is set, the value is used as the method for posting message
instead of gnus-post-method
.
mail-source
If it is set, and the setting of mail-sources
includes a
group
mail source (see section Mail Sources), the value is a
mail source for this group.
banner
An item like (banner . regexp)
causes any part of an article
that matches the regular expression regexp to be stripped. Instead of
regexp, you can also use the symbol signature
which strips the
last signature or any of the elements of the alist
gnus-article-banner-alist
.
sieve
This parameter contains a Sieve test that should match incoming mail that should be placed in this group. From this group parameter, a Sieve ‘IF’ control structure is generated, having the test as the condition and ‘fileinto "group.name";’ as the body.
For example, if the ‘INBOX.list.sieve’ group has the (sieve
address "sender" "sieve-admin@extundo.com")
group parameter, when
translating the group parameter into a Sieve script (see section Sieve Commands) the following Sieve code is generated:
if address "sender" "sieve-admin@extundo.com" { fileinto "INBOX.list.sieve"; } |
To generate tests for multiple email-addresses use a group parameter
like (sieve address "sender" ("name@one.org" else@two.org"))
.
When generating a sieve script (see section Sieve Commands) Sieve code
like the following is generated:
if address "sender" ["name@one.org", "else@two.org"] { fileinto "INBOX.list.sieve"; } |
You can also use regexp expansions in the rules:
(sieve header :regex "list-id" "<c++std-\\1.accu.org>") |
See see section Sieve Commands for commands and variables that might be of interest in relation to the sieve parameter.
The Sieve language is described in RFC 3028. See Emacs Sieve: (sieve)Top section ‘Top’ in Emacs Sieve.
(agent parameters)
If the agent has been enabled, you can set any of its parameters to control the behavior of the agent in individual groups. See Agent Parameters in Category Syntax. Most users will choose to set agent parameters in either an agent category or group topic to minimize the configuration effort.
(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
eval
ed there.
Note that this feature sets the variable locally to the summary buffer
if and only if variable has been bound as a variable. Otherwise,
only evaluating the form will take place. So, you may want to bind the
variable in advance using defvar
or other if the result of the
form needs to be set to it.
But some variables are evaluated in the article buffer, or in the
message buffer (of a reply or followup or otherwise newly created
message). As a workaround, it might help to add the variable in
question to gnus-newsgroup-variables
. See section Various Summary Stuff. So if you want to set message-from-style
via the group
parameters, then you may need the following statement elsewhere in your
‘~/.gnus.el’ file:
(add-to-list 'gnus-newsgroup-variables 'message-from-style) |
A use for this feature is to remove a mailing list identifier tag in the subject fields of articles. E.g., if the news group
nntp+news.gnus.org:gmane.text.docbook.apps |
has the tag ‘DOC-BOOK-APPS:’ in the subject of all articles, this
tag can be removed from the article subjects in the summary buffer for
the group by putting (gnus-list-identifiers "DOCBOOK-APPS:")
into the group parameters for the group.
This can also be used as a group-specific hook function. If you want to
hear a beep when you enter a group, you could put something like
(dummy-variable (ding))
in the parameters of that group. If
dummy-variable
has been bound (see above), it will be set to the
(meaningless) result of the (ding)
form.
Alternatively, since the VARIABLE becomes local to the group, this pattern can be used to temporarily change a hook. For example, if the following is added to a group parameter
(gnus-summary-prepared-hook (lambda nil (local-set-key "d" (local-key-binding "n")))) |
when the group is entered, the ’d’ key will not mark the article as expired.
Group parameters can be set via the gnus-parameters
variable too.
But some variables, such as visible
, have no effect (For this
case see gnus-permanently-visible-groups
as an alternative.).
For example:
(setq gnus-parameters '(("mail\\..*" (gnus-show-threads nil) (gnus-use-scoring nil) (gnus-summary-line-format "%U%R%z%I%(%[%d:%ub%-23,23f%]%) %s\n") (gcc-self . t) (display . all)) ("^nnimap:\\(foo.bar\\)$" (to-group . "\\1")) ("mail\\.me" (gnus-use-scoring t)) ("list\\..*" (total-expire . t) (broken-reply-to . t)))) |
All clauses that matches the group name will be used, but the last
setting “wins”. So if you have two clauses that both match the
group name, and both set, say display
, the last setting will
override the first.
Parameters that are strings will be subjected to regexp substitution,
as the to-group
example shows.
By default, whether comparing the group name and one of those regexps
specified in gnus-parameters
is done in a case-sensitive manner
or a case-insensitive manner depends on the value of
case-fold-search
at the time when the comparison is done. The
value of case-fold-search
is typically t
; it means, for
example, the element ("INBOX\\.FOO" (total-expire . t))
might be
applied to both the ‘INBOX.FOO’ group and the ‘INBOX.foo’
group. If you want to make those regexps always case-sensitive, set the
value of the gnus-parameters-case-fold-search
variable to
nil
. Otherwise, set it to t
if you want to compare them
always in a case-insensitive manner.
You can define different sorting to different groups via
gnus-parameters
. Here is an example to sort an NNTP
group by reverse date to see the latest news at the top and an
RSS group by subject. In this example, the first group is the
Debian daily news group gmane.linux.debian.user.news
from
news.gmane.org. The RSS group corresponds to the Debian
weekly news RSS feed
http://packages.debian.org/unstable/newpkg_main.en.rdf,
See section RSS.
(setq gnus-parameters '(("nntp.*gmane\\.debian\\.user\\.news" (gnus-show-threads nil) (gnus-article-sort-functions '((not gnus-article-sort-by-date))) (gnus-use-adaptive-scoring nil) (gnus-use-scoring nil)) ("nnrss.*debian" (gnus-show-threads nil) (gnus-article-sort-functions 'gnus-article-sort-by-subject) (gnus-use-adaptive-scoring nil) (gnus-use-scoring t) (gnus-score-find-score-files-function 'gnus-score-find-single) (gnus-summary-line-format "%U%R%z%d %I%(%[ %s %]%)\n")))) |
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
These commands all list various slices of the groups available.
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).
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).
List all unread groups on a specific level
(gnus-group-list-level
). If given a prefix, also list the groups
with no unread articles.
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.
List all zombie groups (gnus-group-list-zombies
).
List all unread, subscribed groups with names that match a regexp
(gnus-group-list-matching
).
List groups that match a regexp (gnus-group-list-all-matching
).
List absolutely all groups 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 groups that
don’t exist (yet)—these will be listed as if they were killed groups.
Take the output with some grains of salt.
List all groups that have names that match a regexp
(gnus-group-apropos
).
List all groups that have names or descriptions that match a regexp
(gnus-group-description-apropos
).
List all groups with cached articles (gnus-group-list-cached
).
List all groups with dormant articles (gnus-group-list-dormant
).
List all groups with ticked articles (gnus-group-list-ticked
).
Further limit groups within the current selection
(gnus-group-list-limit
). If you’ve first limited to groups
with dormant articles with A ?, you can then further limit with
A / c, which will then limit to groups with cached articles,
giving you the groups that have both dormant articles and cached
articles.
Flush groups from the current selection (gnus-group-list-flush
).
List groups plus the current selection (gnus-group-list-plus
).
Groups that match the gnus-permanently-visible-groups
regexp will
always be shown, whether they have unread articles or not. You can also
add the visible
element to the group parameters in question to
get the same effect.
Groups that have just ticked articles in it are normally listed in the
group buffer. If gnus-list-groups-with-ticked-articles
is
nil
, these groups will be treated just like totally empty
groups. It is t
by default.
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
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. See section 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. See section Group Score.
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-by-server
Sort alphabetically on the Gnus server name.
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:
Sort the group buffer alphabetically by group name
(gnus-group-sort-groups-by-alphabet
).
Sort the group buffer by the number of unread articles
(gnus-group-sort-groups-by-unread
).
Sort the group buffer by group level
(gnus-group-sort-groups-by-level
).
Sort the group buffer by group score
(gnus-group-sort-groups-by-score
). See section Group Score.
Sort the group buffer by group rank
(gnus-group-sort-groups-by-rank
). See section Group Score.
Sort the group buffer alphabetically by back end name
(gnus-group-sort-groups-by-method
).
Sort the group buffer alphabetically by real (unprefixed) group name
(gnus-group-sort-groups-by-real-name
).
All the commands below obey the process/prefix convention (see section Process/Prefix).
When given a symbolic prefix (see section Symbolic Prefixes), all these commands will sort in reverse order.
You can also sort a subset of the groups:
Sort the groups alphabetically by group name
(gnus-group-sort-selected-groups-by-alphabet
).
Sort the groups by the number of unread articles
(gnus-group-sort-selected-groups-by-unread
).
Sort the groups by group level
(gnus-group-sort-selected-groups-by-level
).
Sort the groups by group score
(gnus-group-sort-selected-groups-by-score
). See section Group Score.
Sort the groups by group rank
(gnus-group-sort-selected-groups-by-rank
). See section Group Score.
Sort the groups alphabetically by back end name
(gnus-group-sort-selected-groups-by-method
).
Sort the groups alphabetically by real (unprefixed) group name
(gnus-group-sort-selected-groups-by-real-name
).
Sort the groups according to gnus-group-sort-function
.
And finally, note that you can use C-k and C-y to manually move groups around.
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
Find bogus groups and delete them
(gnus-group-check-bogus-groups
).
Find new groups and process them (gnus-group-find-new-groups
).
With 1 C-u, use the ask-server
method to query the server
for new groups. With 2 C-u’s, use most complete method possible
to query the server for new groups, and subscribe the new groups as
zombies.
Run all expirable articles in the current group through the expiry
process (if any) (gnus-group-expire-articles
). That is, delete
all expirable articles in the group that have been around for a while.
(see section Expiring Mail).
Run all expirable articles in all groups through the expiry process
(gnus-group-expire-all-groups
).
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
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 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:
Go to the next group (gnus-group-next-group
).
Go to the previous group (gnus-group-prev-group
).
Enter the current group and display the first article
(gnus-browse-read-group
).
Enter the current group (gnus-browse-select-group
).
Unsubscribe to the current group, or, as will be the case here,
subscribe to it (gnus-browse-unsubscribe-current-group
). You
can affect the way the new group is entered into the Group buffer
using the variable gnus-browse-subscribe-newsgroup-method
. See
see section Subscription Methods for available options.
Exit browse mode (gnus-browse-exit
).
Describe the current group (gnus-browse-describe-group
).
Describe browse mode briefly (well, there’s not much to describe, is
there) (gnus-browse-describe-briefly
).
This function will delete the current group
(gnus-browse-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.
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
Yes, Gnus is ex(c)iting.
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?
Quit Gnus (gnus-group-exit
).
Quit Gnus without saving the ‘.newsrc’ files (gnus-group-quit
).
The dribble file will be saved, though (see section Auto Save).
gnus-suspend-gnus-hook
is called when you suspend Gnus and
gnus-exit-gnus-hook
is called when you quit Gnus, while
gnus-after-exiting-gnus-hook
is called as the final item when
exiting Gnus.
Note:
Miss Lisa Cannifax, while sitting in English class, felt her feet go numbly heavy and herself fall into a hazy trance as the boy sitting behind her drew repeated lines with his pencil across the back of her plastic chair.
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
If you read lots and lots of groups, it might be convenient to group them hierarchically according to topics. You put your Emacs groups over here, your sex groups over there, and the rest (what, two groups or so?) you put in some misc section that you never bother with anyway. You can even group the Emacs sex groups as a sub-topic to either the Emacs groups or the sex groups—or both! Go wild!
Here’s an example:
Gnus Emacs -- I wuw it! 3: comp.emacs 2: alt.religion.emacs Naughty Emacs 452: alt.sex.emacs 0: comp.talk.emacs.recovery Misc 8: comp.binaries.fractals 13: comp.sources.unix |
To get this fab functionality you simply turn on (ooh!) the
gnus-topic
minor mode—type t in the group buffer. (This
is a toggling command.)
Go ahead, just try it. I’ll still be here when you get back. La de dum… Nice tune, that… la la la… What, you’re back? Yes, and now press l. There. All your groups are now listed under ‘misc’. Doesn’t that make you feel all warm and fuzzy? Hot and bothered?
If you want this permanently enabled, you should add that minor mode to the hook for the group mode. Put the following line in your ‘~/.gnus.el’ file:
(add-hook 'gnus-group-mode-hook 'gnus-topic-mode) |
2.16.1 Topic Commands | Interactive E-Z commands. | |
2.16.2 Topic Variables | How to customize the topics the Lisp Way. | |
2.16.3 Topic Sorting | Sorting each topic individually. | |
2.16.4 Topic Topology | A map of the world. | |
2.16.5 Topic Parameters | Parameters that apply to all groups in a topic. |
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
When the topic minor mode is turned on, a new T submap will be available. In addition, a few of the standard keys change their definitions slightly.
In general, the following kinds of operations are possible on topics. First of all, you want to create topics. Secondly, you want to put groups in topics and to move them around until you have an order you like. The third kind of operation is to show/hide parts of the whole shebang. You might want to hide a topic including its subtopics and groups, to get a better overview of the other groups.
Here is a list of the basic keys that you might need to set up topics the way you like.
Prompt for a new topic name and create it
(gnus-topic-create-topic
).
“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.
“Un-indent” the current topic so that it becomes a sub-topic of the
parent of its current parent (gnus-topic-unindent
).
The following two keys can be used to move groups and topics around. They work like the well-known cut and paste. C-k is like cut and C-y is like paste. Of course, this being Emacs, we use the terms kill and yank rather than cut and paste.
Kill a group or topic (gnus-topic-kill-group
). All groups in the
topic will be removed along with the topic.
Yank the previously killed group or topic
(gnus-topic-yank-group
). Note that all topics will be yanked
before all groups.
So, to move a topic to the beginning of the list of topics, just hit C-k on it. This is like the “cut” part of cut and paste. Then, move the cursor to the beginning of the buffer (just below the “Gnus” topic) and hit C-y. This is like the “paste” part of cut and paste. Like I said—E-Z.
You can use C-k and C-y on groups as well as on topics. So you can move topics around as well as groups.
After setting up the topics the way you like them, you might wish to hide a topic, or to show it again. That’s why we have the following key.
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.
Now for a list of other commands, in no particular order.
Move the current group to some other topic
(gnus-topic-move-group
). This command uses the process/prefix
convention (see section Process/Prefix).
Go to a topic (gnus-topic-jump-to-topic
).
Copy the current group to some other topic
(gnus-topic-copy-group
). This command uses the process/prefix
convention (see section Process/Prefix).
Hide the current topic (gnus-topic-hide-topic
). If given
a prefix, hide the topic permanently.
Show the current topic (gnus-topic-show-topic
). If given
a prefix, show the topic permanently.
Remove a group from the current topic (gnus-topic-remove-group
).
This command is mainly useful if you have the same group in several
topics and wish to remove it from one of the topics. You may also
remove a group from all topics, but in that case, Gnus will add it to
the root topic the next time you start Gnus. In fact, all new groups
(which, naturally, don’t belong to any topic) will show up in the root
topic.
This command uses the process/prefix convention (see section Process/Prefix).
Move all groups that match some regular expression to a topic
(gnus-topic-move-matching
).
Copy all groups that match some regular expression to a topic
(gnus-topic-copy-matching
).
Toggle hiding empty topics
(gnus-topic-toggle-display-empty-topics
).
Mark all groups in the current topic with the process mark
(gnus-topic-mark-topic
). This command works recursively on
sub-topics unless given a prefix.
Remove the process mark from all groups in the current topic
(gnus-topic-unmark-topic
). This command works recursively on
sub-topics unless given a prefix.
Run all expirable articles in the current group or topic through the
expiry process (if any)
(gnus-topic-expire-articles
). (see section Expiring Mail).
Rename a topic (gnus-topic-rename
).
Delete an empty topic (gnus-topic-delete
).
List all groups that Gnus knows about in a topics-ified way
(gnus-topic-list-active
).
Go to the next topic (gnus-topic-goto-next-topic
).
Go to the previous topic (gnus-topic-goto-previous-topic
).
Edit the topic parameters (gnus-topic-edit-parameters
).
See section Topic Parameters.
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
The previous section told you how to tell Gnus which topics to display. This section explains how to tell Gnus what to display about each topic.
The topic lines themselves are created according to the
gnus-topic-line-format
variable (see section Formatting Variables).
Valid elements are:
Indentation.
Topic name.
Visibility.
Level.
Number of groups in the topic.
Number of unread articles in the topic.
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
.
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
You can sort the groups in each topic individually with the following commands:
Sort the current topic alphabetically by group name
(gnus-topic-sort-groups-by-alphabet
).
Sort the current topic by the number of unread articles
(gnus-topic-sort-groups-by-unread
).
Sort the current topic by group level
(gnus-topic-sort-groups-by-level
).
Sort the current topic by group score
(gnus-topic-sort-groups-by-score
). See section Group Score.
Sort the current topic by group rank
(gnus-topic-sort-groups-by-rank
). See section Group Score.
Sort the current topic alphabetically by back end name
(gnus-topic-sort-groups-by-method
).
Sort the current topic alphabetically by server name
(gnus-topic-sort-groups-by-server
).
Sort the current topic according to the function(s) given by the
gnus-group-sort-function
variable
(gnus-topic-sort-groups
).
When given a prefix argument, all these commands will sort in reverse order. See section Sorting Groups, for more information about group sorting.
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
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
.
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
All groups in a topic will inherit group parameters from the parent (and ancestor) topic parameters. All valid group parameters are valid topic parameters (see section Group Parameters). When the agent is enabled, all agent parameters (See Agent Parameters in Category Syntax) are also valid topic parameters.
In addition, the following parameters are only valid as topic parameters:
subscribe
When subscribing new groups by topic (see section Subscription Methods), the
subscribe
topic parameter says what groups go in what topic. Its
value should be a regexp to match the groups that should go in that
topic.
subscribe-level
When subscribing new groups by topic (see the subscribe
parameter),
the group will be subscribed with the level specified in the
subscribe-level
instead of gnus-level-default-subscribed
.
Group parameters (of course) override topic parameters, and topic parameters in sub-topics override topic parameters in super-topics. You know. Normal inheritance rules. (Rules is here a noun, not a verb, although you may feel free to disagree with me here.)
Gnus Emacs 3: comp.emacs 2: alt.religion.emacs 452: alt.sex.emacs Relief 452: alt.sex.emacs 0: comp.talk.emacs.recovery Misc 8: comp.binaries.fractals 13: comp.sources.unix 452: alt.sex.emacs |
The ‘Emacs’ topic has the topic parameter (score-file
. "emacs.SCORE")
; the ‘Relief’ topic has the topic parameter
(score-file . "relief.SCORE")
; and the ‘Misc’ topic has the
topic parameter (score-file . "emacs.SCORE")
. In addition,
‘alt.religion.emacs’ has the group parameter (score-file
. "religion.SCORE")
.
Now, when you enter ‘alt.sex.emacs’ in the ‘Relief’ topic, you will get the ‘relief.SCORE’ home score file. If you enter the same group in the ‘Emacs’ topic, you’ll get the ‘emacs.SCORE’ home score file. If you enter the group ‘alt.religion.emacs’, you’ll get the ‘religion.SCORE’ home score file.
This seems rather simple and self-evident, doesn’t it? Well, yes. But
there are some problems, especially with the total-expiry
parameter. Say you have a mail group in two topics; one with
total-expiry
and one without. What happens when you do M-x
gnus-expire-all-expirable-groups? Gnus has no way of telling which one
of these topics you mean to expire articles from, so anything may
happen. In fact, I hereby declare that it is undefined what
happens. You just have to be careful if you do stuff like that.
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
There are some news servers that provide groups of which the names are
expressed with their native languages in the world. For instance, in a
certain news server there are some newsgroups of which the names are
spelled in Chinese, where people are talking in Chinese. You can, of
course, subscribe to such news groups using Gnus. Currently Gnus
supports non-ASCII group names not only with the nntp
back end but also with the nnml
back end and the nnrss
back end.
Every such group name is encoded by a certain charset in the server side (in an NNTP server its administrator determines the charset, but for groups in the other back ends it is determined by you). Gnus has to display the decoded ones for you in the group buffer and the article buffer, and needs to use the encoded ones when communicating with servers. However, Gnus doesn’t know what charset is used for each non-ASCII group name. The following two variables are just the ones for telling Gnus what charset should be used for each group:
gnus-group-name-charset-method-alist
An alist of select methods and charsets. The default value is
nil
. The names of groups in the server specified by that select
method are all supposed to use the corresponding charset. For example:
(setq gnus-group-name-charset-method-alist '(((nntp "news.com.cn") . cn-gb-2312))) |
Charsets specified for groups with this variable are preferred to the
ones specified for the same groups with the
gnus-group-name-charset-group-alist
variable (see below).
A select method can be very long, like:
(nntp "gmane" (nntp-address "news.gmane.org") (nntp-end-of-line "\n") (nntp-open-connection-function nntp-open-via-rlogin-and-telnet) (nntp-via-rlogin-command "ssh") (nntp-via-rlogin-command-switches ("-C" "-t" "-e" "none")) (nntp-via-address …)) |
In that case, you can truncate it into (nntp "gmane")
in this
variable. That is, it is enough to contain only the back end name and
the server name.
gnus-group-name-charset-group-alist
An alist of regexp of group name and the charset for group names.
((".*" . utf-8))
is the default value if UTF-8 is supported,
otherwise the default is nil
. For example:
(setq gnus-group-name-charset-group-alist '(("\\.com\\.cn:" . cn-gb-2312) (".*" . utf-8))) |
Note that this variable is ignored if the match is made with
gnus-group-name-charset-method-alist
.
Those two variables are used also to determine the charset for encoding
and decoding non-ASCII group names that are in the back ends
other than nntp
. It means that it is you who determine it. If
you do nothing, the charset used for group names in those back ends will
all be utf-8
because of the last element of
gnus-group-name-charset-group-alist
.
There is one more important variable for non-ASCII group names:
nnmail-pathname-coding-system
The value of this variable should be a coding system or nil
. The
default is nil
in Emacs, or is the aliasee of the coding system
named file-name
(a certain coding system of which an alias is
file-name
) in XEmacs.
The nnml
back end, the nnrss
back end, the agent, and
the cache use non-ASCII group names in those files and
directories. This variable overrides the value of
file-name-coding-system
which specifies the coding system used
when encoding and decoding those file names and directory names.
In XEmacs (with the mule
feature), file-name-coding-system
is the only means to specify the coding system used to encode and decode
file names. On the other hand, Emacs uses the value of
default-file-name-coding-system
if file-name-coding-system
is nil
or it is bound to the value of
nnmail-pathname-coding-system
which is nil
.
Normally the value of default-file-name-coding-system
in Emacs or
nnmail-pathname-coding-system
in XEmacs is initialized according
to the locale, so you will need to do nothing if the value is suitable
to encode and decode non-ASCII group names.
The value of this variable (or default-file-name-coding-system
)
does not necessarily need to be the same value that is determined by
gnus-group-name-charset-method-alist
and
gnus-group-name-charset-group-alist
.
If default-file-name-coding-system
or this variable is
initialized by default to iso-latin-1
for example, although you
want to subscribe to the groups spelled in Chinese, that is the most
typical case where you have to customize
nnmail-pathname-coding-system
. The utf-8
coding system is
a good candidate for it. Otherwise, you may change the locale in your
system so that default-file-name-coding-system
or this variable
may be initialized to an appropriate value.
Note that when you copy or move articles from a non-ASCII group to another group, the charset used to encode and decode group names should be the same in both groups. Otherwise the Newsgroups header will be displayed incorrectly in the article buffer.
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
2.18.1 Scanning New Messages | Asking Gnus to see whether new messages have arrived. | |
2.18.2 Group Information | Information and help on groups and Gnus. | |
2.18.3 Group Timestamp | Making Gnus keep track of when you last read a group. | |
2.18.4 File Commands | Reading and writing the Gnus files. | |
2.18.5 Sieve Commands | Managing Sieve scripts. |
The key v is reserved for users. You can bind it to some command or better use it as a prefix key. For example:
(define-key gnus-group-mode-map (kbd "v j d") (lambda () (interactive) (gnus-group-jump-to-group "nndraft:drafts"))) |
On keys reserved for users in Emacs and on keybindings in general See Keymaps: (emacs)Keymaps section ‘Keymaps’ in The Emacs Editor.
Enter the server buffer (gnus-group-enter-server-mode
).
See section Server Buffer.
Start composing a message (a news by default)
(gnus-group-post-news
). If given a prefix, post to the group
under the point. If the prefix is 1, prompt for a group to post to.
Contrary to what the name of this function suggests, the prepared
article might be a mail instead of a news, if a mail group is specified
with the prefix argument. See section Composing Messages.
Mail a message somewhere (gnus-group-mail
). If given a prefix,
use the posting style of the group under the point. If the prefix is 1,
prompt for a group name to find the posting style.
See section Composing Messages.
Start composing a news (gnus-group-news
). If given a prefix,
post to the group under the point. If the prefix is 1, prompt
for group to post to. See section Composing Messages.
This function actually prepares a news even when using mail groups. This is useful for “posting” messages to mail groups without actually sending them over the network: they’re just saved directly to the group in question. The corresponding back end must have a request-post method for this to work though.
Compact the group under point (gnus-group-compact-group
).
Currently implemented only in nnml (see section Mail Spool). This removes
gaps between article numbers, hence getting a correct total article
count.
Variables for the group buffer:
gnus-group-mode-hook
is called after the group buffer has been created.
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-group-prepared-hook
is called as the very last thing after the group buffer has been generated. It may be used to move point around, for instance.
gnus-permanently-visible-groups
Groups matching this regexp will always be listed in the group buffer, whether they are empty or not.
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
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 re-reading of the active file(s) from the
back end(s).
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.
Activate absolutely all groups (gnus-activate-all-groups
).
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.
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
Describe the current group (gnus-group-describe-group
). If given
a prefix, force Gnus to re-read the description from the server.
Describe all groups (gnus-group-describe-all-groups
). If given a
prefix, force Gnus to re-read the description file from the server.
Display current Gnus version numbers (gnus-version
).
Give a very short help message (gnus-group-describe-briefly
).
Go to the Gnus info node (gnus-info-find-node
).
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
It can be convenient to let Gnus keep track of when you last read a
group. To set the ball rolling, you should add
gnus-group-set-timestamp
to gnus-select-group-hook
:
(add-hook 'gnus-select-group-hook 'gnus-group-set-timestamp) |
After doing this, each time you enter a group, it’ll be recorded.
This information can be displayed in various ways—the easiest is to use the ‘%d’ spec in the group line format:
(setq gnus-group-line-format "%M\%S\%p\%P\%5y: %(%-40,40g%) %d\n") |
This will result in lines looking like:
* 0: mail.ding 19961002T012943 0: custom 19961002T012713 |
As you can see, the date is displayed in compact ISO 8601 format. This may be a bit too much, so to just display the date, you could say something like:
(setq gnus-group-line-format "%M\%S\%p\%P\%5y: %(%-40,40g%) %6,6~(cut 2)d\n") |
If you would like greater control of the time format, you can use a user-defined format spec. Something like the following should do the trick:
(setq gnus-group-line-format "%M\%S\%p\%P\%5y: %(%-40,40g%) %ud\n") (defun gnus-user-format-function-d (headers) (let ((time (gnus-group-timestamp gnus-tmp-group))) (if time (format-time-string "%b %d %H:%M" time) ""))) |
To see what variables are dynamically bound (like
gnus-tmp-group
), you have to look at the source code. The
variable names aren’t guaranteed to be stable over Gnus versions,
either.
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
Re-read the init file (gnus-init-file
, which defaults to
‘~/.gnus.el’) (gnus-group-read-init-file
).
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.
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
Sieve is a server-side mail filtering language. In Gnus you can use
the sieve
group parameter (see section Group Parameters) to specify
sieve rules that should apply to each group. Gnus provides two
commands to translate all these group parameters into a proper Sieve
script that can be transferred to the server somehow.
The generated Sieve script is placed in gnus-sieve-file
(by
default ‘~/.sieve’). The Sieve code that Gnus generate is placed
between two delimiters, gnus-sieve-region-start
and
gnus-sieve-region-end
, so you may write additional Sieve code
outside these delimiters that will not be removed the next time you
regenerate the Sieve script.
The variable gnus-sieve-crosspost
controls how the Sieve script
is generated. If it is non-nil
(the default) articles is
placed in all groups that have matching rules, otherwise the article
is only placed in the group with the first matching rule. For
example, the group parameter ‘(sieve address "sender"
"owner-ding@hpc.uh.edu")’ will generate the following piece of Sieve
code if gnus-sieve-crosspost
is nil
. (When
gnus-sieve-crosspost
is non-nil
, it looks the same
except that the line containing the call to stop
is removed.)
if address "sender" "owner-ding@hpc.uh.edu" { fileinto "INBOX.ding"; stop; } |
See Emacs Sieve: (sieve)Top section ‘Top’ in Emacs Sieve.
Regenerate a Sieve script from the sieve
group parameters and
put you into the gnus-sieve-file
without saving it.
Regenerates the Gnus managed part of gnus-sieve-file
using the
sieve
group parameters, save the file and upload it to the
server using the sieveshell
program.
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
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 section Selecting a Group).
You can have as many summary buffers open as you wish.
You can customize the Summary Mode tool bar, see M-x customize-apropos RET gnus-summary-tool-bar. This feature is only available in Emacs.
The key v is reserved for users. You can bind it to some command or better use it as a prefix key. For example:
(define-key gnus-summary-mode-map (kbd "v -") "LrS") ;; lower subthread |
3.1 Summary Buffer Format | Deciding how the summary buffer is to look. | |
3.2 Summary Maneuvering | Moving around the summary buffer. | |
3.3 Choosing Articles | Reading articles. | |
3.4 Scrolling the Article | Scrolling the current article. | |
3.5 Reply, Followup and Post | Posting articles. | |
3.6 Delayed Articles | Send articles at a later time. | |
3.7 Marking Articles | Marking articles as read, expirable, etc. | |
3.8 Limiting | You can limit the summary buffer. | |
3.9 Threading | How threads are made. | |
3.10 Sorting the Summary Buffer | How articles and threads are sorted. | |
3.11 Asynchronous Article Fetching | Gnus might be able to pre-fetch articles. | |
3.12 Article Caching | You may store articles in a cache. | |
3.13 Persistent Articles | Making articles expiry-resistant. | |
3.14 Sticky Articles | Article buffers that are not reused. | |
3.15 Article Backlog | Having already read articles hang around. | |
3.16 Saving Articles | Ways of customizing article saving. | |
3.17 Decoding Articles | Gnus can treat series of (uu)encoded articles. | |
3.18 Article Treatment | The article buffer can be mangled at will. | |
3.19 MIME Commands | Doing MIMEy things with the articles. | |
3.20 Charsets | Character set issues. | |
3.21 Article Commands | Doing various things with the article buffer. | |
3.22 Summary Sorting | Sorting the summary buffer in various ways. | |
3.23 Finding the Parent | No child support? Get the parent. | |
3.24 Alternative Approaches | Reading using non-default summaries. | |
3.25 Tree Display | A more visual display of threads. | |
3.26 Mail Group Commands | Some commands can only be used in mail groups. | |
3.27 Various Summary Stuff | What didn’t fit anywhere else. | |
3.28 Exiting the Summary Buffer | Returning to the Group buffer, or reselecting the current group. | |
3.29 Crosspost Handling | How crossposted articles are dealt with. | |
3.30 Duplicate Suppression | An alternative when crosspost handling fails. | |
3.31 Security | Decrypt and Verify. | |
3.32 Mailing List | Mailing list minor mode. |
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
3.1.1 Summary Buffer Lines | You can specify how summary lines should look. | |
3.1.2 To From Newsgroups | How to not display your own name. | |
3.1.3 Summary Buffer Mode Line | You can say how the mode line should look. | |
3.1.4 Summary Highlighting | Making the summary buffer all pretty and nice. |
Gnus will use the value of the gnus-extract-address-components
variable as a function for getting the name and address parts of a
From
header. Two pre-defined functions exist:
gnus-extract-address-components
, which is the default, quite
fast, and too simplistic solution; and
mail-extract-address-components
, which works very nicely, but is
slower. The default function will return the wrong answer in 5% of the
cases. If this is unacceptable to you, use the other function instead:
(setq gnus-extract-address-components 'mail-extract-address-components) |
gnus-summary-same-subject
is a string indicating that the current
article has the same subject as the previous. This string will be used
with those specs that require it. The default is ""
.
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
You can change the format of the lines in the summary buffer by changing
the gnus-summary-line-format
variable. It works along the same
lines as a normal format
string, with some extensions
(see section Formatting Variables).
There should always be a colon or a point position marker on the line;
the cursor always moves to the point position marker or the colon after
performing an operation. (Of course, Gnus wouldn’t be Gnus if it wasn’t
possible to change this. Just write a new function
gnus-goto-colon
which does whatever you like with the cursor.)
See section Positioning Point.
The default string is ‘%U%R%z%I%(%[%4L: %-23,23f%]%) %s\n’.
The following format specification characters and extended format specification(s) are understood:
Article number.
Subject string. List identifiers stripped,
gnus-list-identifiers
. See section Article Hiding.
Subject if the article is the root of the thread or the previous article
had a different subject, gnus-summary-same-subject
otherwise.
(gnus-summary-same-subject
defaults to ""
.)
Full From
header.
The name (from the From
header).
The name, To
header or the Newsgroups
header (see section To From Newsgroups).
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.
The address (from the From
header). This works the same way as
the a
spec.
Number of lines in the article.
Number of characters in the article. This specifier is not supported in some methods (like nnfolder).
Pretty-printed version of the number of characters in the article; for example, ‘1.2k’ or ‘0.4M’.
Indentation based on thread level (see section Customizing Threading).
A complex trn-style thread tree, showing response-connecting trace lines. A thread could be drawn like this:
> +-> | +-> | | \-> | | \-> | \-> +-> \-> |
You can customize the appearance with the following options. Note that it is possible to make the thread display look really neat by replacing the default ASCII characters with graphic line-drawing glyphs.
gnus-sum-thread-tree-root
Used for the root of a thread. If nil
, use subject
instead. The default is ‘> ’.
gnus-sum-thread-tree-false-root
Used for the false root of a thread (see section Loose Threads). If
nil
, use subject instead. The default is ‘> ’.
gnus-sum-thread-tree-single-indent
Used for a thread with just one message. If nil
, use subject
instead. The default is ‘’.
gnus-sum-thread-tree-vertical
Used for drawing a vertical line. The default is ‘| ’.
gnus-sum-thread-tree-indent
Used for indenting. The default is ‘ ’.
gnus-sum-thread-tree-leaf-with-other
Used for a leaf with brothers. The default is ‘+-> ’.
gnus-sum-thread-tree-single-leaf
Used for a leaf without brothers. The default is ‘\-> ’
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 section 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.
Unread. See section Read Articles.
This misleadingly named specifier is the secondary mark. This mark will say whether the article has been replied to, has been cached, or has been saved. See section Other Marks.
Score as a number (see section Scoring).
Zcore, ‘+’ if above the default level and ‘-’ if below the
default level. If the difference between
gnus-summary-default-score
and the score is less than
gnus-summary-zcore-fuzz
, this spec will not be used.
Total thread score.
Xref
.
Date
.
The Date
in DD-MMM
format.
The Date
in YYYYMMDDT
HHMMSS format.
Message-ID
.
References
.
Number of articles in the current sub-thread. Using this spec will slow down summary buffer generation somewhat.
An ‘=’ (gnus-not-empty-thread-mark
) will be displayed if the
article has any children.
The line number.
Download mark.
Desired cursor position (instead of after first colon).
Age sensitive date format. Various date format is defined in
gnus-user-date-format-alist
.
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.
Text between ‘%(’ and ‘%)’ will be highlighted with
gnus-mouse-face
when the mouse point is placed inside the area.
There can only be one such area.
The ‘%U’ (status), ‘%R’ (replied) and ‘%z’ (zcore) specs have to be handled with care. For reasons of efficiency, Gnus will compute what column these characters will end up in, and “hard-code” that. This means that it is invalid to have these specs after a variable-length spec. Well, you might not be arrested, but your summary buffer will look strange, which is bad enough.
The smart choice is to have these specs as far to the left as possible. (Isn’t that the case with everything, though? But I digress.)
This restriction may disappear in later versions of Gnus.
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
In some groups (particularly in archive groups), the From
header
isn’t very interesting, since all the articles there are written by
you. To display the information in the To
or Newsgroups
headers instead, you need to decide three things: What information to
gather; where to display it; and when to display it.
gnus-extra-headers
. This is a list of header symbols. For
instance:
(setq gnus-extra-headers '(To Newsgroups X-Newsreader)) |
This will result in Gnus trying to obtain these three headers, and storing it in header structures for later easy retrieval.
gnus-extra-header
function. Here’s a format line spec that will
access the X-Newsreader
header:
"%~(form (gnus-extra-header 'X-Newsreader))@" |
gnus-ignored-from-addresses
variable says when the ‘%f’
summary line spec returns the To
, Newsreader
or
From
header. If this regexp matches the contents of the
From
header, the value of the To
or Newsreader
headers are used instead.
To distinguish regular articles from those where the From
field
has been swapped, a string is prefixed to the To
or
Newsgroups
header in the summary line. By default the string is
‘-> ’ for To
and ‘=> ’ for Newsgroups
, you can
customize these strings with gnus-summary-to-prefix
and
gnus-summary-newsgroup-prefix
.
A related variable is nnmail-extra-headers
, which controls when
to include extra headers when generating overview (NOV) files.
If you have old overview files, you should regenerate them after
changing this variable, by entering the server buffer using ^,
and then g on the appropriate mail server (e.g., nnml) to cause
regeneration.
You also have to instruct Gnus to display the data by changing the
%n
spec to the %f
spec in the
gnus-summary-line-format
variable.
In summary, you’d typically put something like the following in ‘~/.gnus.el’:
(setq gnus-extra-headers '(To Newsgroups)) (setq nnmail-extra-headers gnus-extra-headers) (setq gnus-summary-line-format "%U%R%z%I%(%[%4L: %-23,23f%]%) %s\n") (setq gnus-ignored-from-addresses "Your Name Here") |
(The values listed above are the default values in Gnus. Alter them to fit your needs.)
A note for news server administrators, or for users who wish to try to convince their news server administrator to provide some additional support:
The above is mostly useful for mail groups, where you have control over the NOV files that are created. However, if you can persuade your nntp admin to add (in the usual implementation, notably INN):
Newsgroups:full |
to the end of her ‘overview.fmt’ file, then you can use that just as you would the extra headers from the mail groups.
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
You can also change the format of the summary mode bar (see section Mode Line Formatting). Set gnus-summary-mode-line-format
to whatever you
like. The default is ‘Gnus: %%b [%A] %Z’.
Here are the elements you can play with:
Group name.
Unprefixed group name.
Current article number.
Current article score.
Gnus version.
Number of unread articles in this group.
Number of unread articles in this group that aren’t displayed in the summary buffer.
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.
Shortish group name. For instance, ‘rec.arts.anime’ will be shortened to ‘r.a.anime’.
Subject of the current article.
User-defined spec (see section User-Defined Specs).
Name of the current score file (see section Scoring).
Number of dormant articles (see section Unread Articles).
Number of ticked articles (see section Unread Articles).
Number of articles that have been marked as read in this session.
Number of articles expunged by the score files.
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
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) 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 of 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.
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
All the straight movement commands understand the numeric prefix and behave pretty much as you’d expect.
None of these commands select articles.
Go to the next summary line of an unread article
(gnus-summary-next-unread-subject
).
Go to the previous summary line of an unread article
(gnus-summary-prev-unread-subject
).
Ask for an article number and then go to 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 with unread articles. As a special case, if this variable
is quietly
, Gnus will select the next group without asking for
confirmation. If this variable is almost-quietly
, the same
will happen only if you are located on the last article in the group.
Finally, if this variable is slightly-quietly
, the Z n
command will go to the next group without confirmation. Also
see section 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 section Customizing Threading).) If there are no more
articles with the same subject, go to the first unread article.
This variable is not particularly useful if you use a threaded display.
gnus-summary-check-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.
This variable can also be a number. In that case, center the window at the given number of lines from the top.
gnus-summary-stop-at-end-of-message
If non-nil
, don’t go to the next article when hitting
SPC, and you’re at the end of the article.
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
3.3.1 Choosing Commands | Commands for choosing articles. | |
3.3.2 Choosing Variables | Variables that influence these commands. |
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
None of the following movement commands understand the numeric prefix, and they all select and display an article.
If you want to fetch new articles or redisplay the group, see Exiting the Summary Buffer.
Select the current article, or, if that one’s read already, the next
unread article (gnus-summary-next-page
).
If you have an article window open already and you press SPACE again, the article will be scrolled. This lets you conveniently SPACE through an entire newsgroup. See section Scrolling the Article.
Go to next unread article (gnus-summary-next-unread-article
).
Go to previous unread article (gnus-summary-prev-unread-article
).
Go to the next article (gnus-summary-next-article
).
Go to the previous article (gnus-summary-prev-article
).
Go to the next article with the same subject
(gnus-summary-next-same-subject
).
Go to the previous article with the same subject
(gnus-summary-prev-same-subject
).
Go to the first unread article
(gnus-summary-first-unread-article
).
Go to the unread article with the highest score
(gnus-summary-best-unread-article
). If given a prefix argument,
go to the first unread article that has a score over the default score.
Go to the previous article read (gnus-summary-goto-last-article
).
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, while l toggles the two last read articles.
For a somewhat related issue (if you use these commands a lot),
see section Article Backlog.
Ask for an article number or Message-ID
, and then go to that
article (gnus-summary-goto-article
).
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
Some variables 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. The default is
nil
. If you would like each article to be saved in the Agent as
you read it, putting gnus-agent-fetch-selected-article
on this
hook will do so.
gnus-mark-article-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-read-mark
. The only
articles not affected by this function are ticked, dormant, and
expirable articles. If you’d instead like to just have unread articles
marked as read, you can use gnus-summary-mark-unread-as-read
instead. It will leave marks like gnus-low-score-mark
,
gnus-del-mark
(and so on) alone.
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
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
).
If gnus-article-skip-boring
is non-nil
and the rest of
the article consists only of citations and signature, then it will be
skipped; the next article will be shown instead. You can customize
what is considered uninteresting with
gnus-article-boring-faces
. You can manually view the article’s
pages, no matter how boring, using C-M-v.
Scroll the current article back one page (gnus-summary-prev-page
).
Scroll the current article one line forward
(gnus-summary-scroll-up
).
Scroll the current article one line backward
(gnus-summary-scroll-down
).
(Re)fetch the current article (gnus-summary-show-article
). If
given a prefix, show a completely “raw” article, just the way it
came from the server. If given a prefix twice (i.e., C-u C-u
g'), fetch the current article, but don’t run any of the article
treatment functions.
If given a numerical prefix, you can do semi-manual charset stuff.
C-u 0 g cn-gb-2312 RET will decode the message as if it were
encoded in the cn-gb-2312
charset. If you have
(setq gnus-summary-show-article-charset-alist '((1 . cn-gb-2312) (2 . big5))) |
then you can say C-u 1 g to get the same effect.
Scroll to the beginning of the article
(gnus-summary-beginning-of-article
).
Scroll to the end of the article (gnus-summary-end-of-article
).
Perform an isearch in the article buffer
(gnus-summary-isearch-article
).
Select the article buffer (gnus-summary-select-article-buffer
).
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
3.5.1 Summary Mail Commands | Sending mail. | |
3.5.2 Summary Post Commands | Sending news. | |
3.5.3 Summary Message Commands | Other Message-related commands. | |
3.5.4 Canceling Articles |
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
Commands for composing a mail message:
Mail a reply to the author of the current article
(gnus-summary-reply
).
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.
Mail a wide reply to the author of the current article
(gnus-summary-wide-reply
). A wide reply is a reply that
goes out to all people listed in the To
, From
(or
Reply-to
) and Cc
headers. If Mail-Followup-To
is
present, that’s used instead.
Mail a wide reply to the current article and include the original
message (gnus-summary-wide-reply-with-original
). This command uses
the process/prefix convention, but only uses the headers from the
first article to determine the recipients.
When replying to a message from a mailing list, send a reply to that
message to the mailing list, and include the original message
(gnus-summary-reply-to-list-with-original
).
Mail a very wide reply to the author of the current article
(gnus-summary-wide-reply
). A very wide reply is a reply
that goes out to all people listed in the To
, From
(or
Reply-to
) and Cc
headers in all the process/prefixed
articles. This command uses the process/prefix convention.
Mail a very wide reply to the author of the current article and include the
original message (gnus-summary-very-wide-reply-with-original
). This
command uses the process/prefix convention.
Mail a reply to the author of the current article but ignore the
Reply-To
field (gnus-summary-reply-broken-reply-to
).
If you need this because a mailing list incorrectly sets a
Reply-To
header pointing to the list, you probably want to set
the broken-reply-to
group parameter instead, so things will work
correctly. See section Group Parameters.
Mail a reply to the author of the current article and include the
original message but ignore the Reply-To
field
(gnus-summary-reply-broken-reply-to-with-original
).
Forward the current article to some other person
(gnus-summary-mail-forward
). If no prefix is given, the message
is forwarded according to the value of (message-forward-as-mime
)
and (message-forward-show-mml
); if the prefix is 1, decode the
message and forward directly inline; if the prefix is 2, forward message
as an rfc822 MIME section; if the prefix is 3, decode message and
forward as an rfc822 MIME section; if the prefix is 4, forward message
directly inline; otherwise, the message is forwarded as no prefix given
but use the flipped value of (message-forward-as-mime
). By
default, the message is decoded and forwarded as an rfc822 MIME
section.
Prepare a mail (gnus-summary-mail-other-window
). By default, use
the posting style of the current group. If given a prefix, disable that.
If the prefix is 1, prompt for a group name to find the posting style.
Prepare a news (gnus-summary-news-other-window
). By default,
post to the current group. If given a prefix, disable that. If the
prefix is 1, prompt for a group to post to.
This function actually prepares a news even when using mail groups. This is useful for “posting” messages to mail groups without actually sending them over the network: they’re just saved directly to the group in question. The corresponding back end must have a request-post method for this to work though.
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.
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 section Process/Prefix).
Like the previous command, but will allow you to edit the message as if it were a new message before resending.
Digest the current series (see section Decoding Articles) and forward the
result using mail (gnus-uu-digest-mail-forward
). This command
uses the process/prefix convention (see section Process/Prefix).
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 against the current
crossposting pandemic that’s sweeping Usenet. It will compose a reply
using the gnus-crosspost-complaint
variable as a preamble. This
command understands the process/prefix convention
(see section Process/Prefix) and will prompt you before sending each mail.
Also See (message)Header Commands section ‘Header Commands’ in The Message Manual, for more information.
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
Commands for posting a news article:
Prepare for posting an article (gnus-summary-post-news
). By
default, post to the current group. If given a prefix, disable that.
If the prefix is 1, prompt for another group instead.
Post a followup to the current article (gnus-summary-followup
).
Post a followup to the current article and include the original message
(gnus-summary-followup-with-original
). This command uses the
process/prefix convention.
Post a followup to the current article via news, even if you got the
message through mail (gnus-summary-followup-to-mail
).
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.
Forward the current article to a newsgroup
(gnus-summary-post-forward
).
If no prefix is given, the message is forwarded according to the value
of (message-forward-as-mime
) and
(message-forward-show-mml
); if the prefix is 1, decode the
message and forward directly inline; if the prefix is 2, forward message
as an rfc822 MIME section; if the prefix is 3, decode message and
forward as an rfc822 MIME section; if the prefix is 4, forward message
directly inline; otherwise, the message is forwarded as no prefix given
but use the flipped value of (message-forward-as-mime
). By
default, the message is decoded and forwarded as an rfc822 MIME section.
Digest the current series and forward the result to a newsgroup
(gnus-uu-digest-post-forward
). This command uses the
process/prefix convention.
Uuencode a file, split it into parts, and post it as a series
(gnus-uu-post-news
). (see section Uuencoding and Posting).
Also See (message)Header Commands section ‘Header Commands’ in The Message Manual, for more information.
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Yank the current article into an already existing Message composition
buffer (gnus-summary-yank-message
). This command prompts for
what message buffer you want to yank into, and understands the
process/prefix convention (see section Process/Prefix).
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
Have you ever written something, and then decided that you really, really, really wish you hadn’t posted that?
Well, you can’t cancel mail, but you can cancel posts.
Find the article you wish to cancel (you can only cancel your own
articles, so don’t try any funny stuff). Then press C or S
c (gnus-summary-cancel-article
). Your article will be
canceled—machines all over the world will be deleting your article.
This command uses the process/prefix convention (see section Process/Prefix).
Be aware, however, that not all sites honor cancels, so your article may live on here and there, while most sites will delete the article in question.
Gnus will use the “current” select method when canceling. If you want to use the standard posting method, use the ‘a’ symbolic prefix (see section Symbolic Prefixes).
Gnus ensures that only you can cancel your own messages using a
Cancel-Lock
header (see Canceling News: (message)Canceling News section ‘Canceling News’ in Message Manual).
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’.
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
Sometimes, you might wish to delay the sending of a message. For
example, you might wish to arrange for a message to turn up just in time
to remind your about the birthday of your Significant Other. For this,
there is the gnus-delay
package. Setup is simple:
(gnus-delay-initialize) |
Normally, to send a message you use the C-c C-c command from
Message mode. To delay a message, use C-c C-j
(gnus-delay-article
) instead. This will ask you for how long the
message should be delayed. Possible answers are:
42d
means to delay for 42 days. Available letters are m
(minutes), h
(hours), d
(days), w
(weeks), M
(months) and Y
(years).
YYYY-MM-DD
. The message will be
delayed until that day, at a specific time (eight o’clock by default).
See also gnus-delay-default-hour
.
hh:mm
format, 24h, no am/pm
stuff. The deadline will be at that time today, except if that time has
already passed, then it’s at the given time tomorrow. So if it’s ten
o’clock in the morning and you specify 11:15
, then the deadline
is one hour and fifteen minutes hence. But if you specify 9:20
,
that means a time tomorrow.
The action of the gnus-delay-article
command is influenced by a
couple of variables:
gnus-delay-default-hour
When you specify a specific date, the message will be due on that hour on the given date. Possible values are integers 0 through 23.
gnus-delay-default-delay
This is a string and gives the default delay. It can be of any of the formats described above.
gnus-delay-group
Delayed articles will be kept in this group on the drafts server until
they are due. You probably don’t need to change this. The default
value is "delayed"
.
gnus-delay-header
The deadline for each article will be stored in a header. This variable
is a string and gives the header name. You probably don’t need to
change this. The default value is "X-Gnus-Delayed"
.
The way delaying works is like this: when you use the
gnus-delay-article
command, you give a certain delay. Gnus
calculates the deadline of the message and stores it in the
X-Gnus-Delayed
header and puts the message in the
nndraft:delayed
group.
And whenever you get new news, Gnus looks through the group for articles
which are due and sends them. It uses the gnus-delay-send-queue
function for this. By default, this function is added to the hook
gnus-get-new-news-hook
. But of course, you can change this.
Maybe you want to use the demon to send drafts? Just tell the demon to
execute the gnus-delay-send-queue
function.
gnus-delay-initialize
By default, this function installs gnus-delay-send-queue
in
gnus-get-new-news-hook
. But it accepts the optional second
argument no-check
. If it is non-nil
,
gnus-get-new-news-hook
is not changed. The optional first
argument is ignored.
For example, (gnus-delay-initialize nil t)
means to do nothing.
Presumably, you want to use the demon for sending due delayed articles.
Just don’t forget to set that up :-)
When delaying an article with C-c C-j, Message mode will
automatically add a "Date"
header with the current time. In
many cases you probably want the "Date"
header to reflect the
time the message is sent instead. To do this, you have to delete
Date
from message-draft-headers
.
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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.
3.7.1 Unread Articles | Marks for unread articles. | |
3.7.2 Read Articles | Marks for read articles. | |
3.7.3 Other Marks | Marks that do not affect readedness. | |
3.7.4 Setting Marks | How to set and remove marks. | |
3.7.5 Generic Marking Commands | How to customize the marking. | |
3.7.6 Setting Process Marks | How to mark articles for later processing. |
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
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 (from news servers by the news server software, Gnus itself never expires ticked messages), so if you want to keep an article forever, you’ll have to make it persistent (see section Persistent Articles).
Marked as dormant (gnus-dormant-mark
).
Dormant articles will only appear in the summary buffer if there are followups to it. If you want to see them even if they don’t have followups, you can use the / D command (see section Limiting). Otherwise (except for the visibility issue), they are just like ticked messages.
Marked as unread (gnus-unread-mark
).
Unread articles are articles that haven’t been read at all yet.
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
All the following marks mark articles as read.
These are articles that the user has marked as read with the d
command manually, more or less (gnus-del-mark
).
Articles that have actually been read (gnus-read-mark
).
Articles that were marked as read in previous sessions and are now
old (gnus-ancient-mark
).
Marked as killed (gnus-killed-mark
).
Marked as killed by kill files (gnus-kill-file-mark
).
Marked as read by having too low a score (gnus-low-score-mark
).
Marked as read by a catchup (gnus-catchup-mark
).
Canceled article (gnus-canceled-mark
)
Sparsely reffed article (gnus-sparse-mark
). See section Customizing Threading.
Article marked as read by duplicate suppression
(gnus-duplicate-mark
). See section 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:
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 expiring of news articles, but in mail groups, for instance, articles marked as expirable can be deleted by Gnus at any time.
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
There are some marks that have nothing to do with whether the article is read or not.
gnus-replied-mark
).
gnus-forwarded-mark
).
gnus-cached-mark
). See section Article Caching.
gnus-saved-mark
).
gnus-unseen-mark
).
gnus-downloaded-mark
controls which character to
use.)
gnus-undownloaded-mark
controls which character to use.)
gnus-downloadable-mark
controls which character to
use.)
gnus-not-empty-thread-mark
and
gnus-empty-thread-mark
in the third column, respectively.
gnus-process-mark
). A
variety of commands react to the presence of the process mark. For
instance, X u (gnus-uu-decode-uu
) will uudecode and view
all articles that have been marked with the process mark. Articles
marked with the process mark have a ‘#’ in the second column.
You might have noticed that most of these “non-readedness” marks appear in the second column by default. So if you have a cached, saved, replied article that you have process-marked, what will that look like?
Nothing much. The precedence rules go as follows: process -> cache -> replied -> saved. So if the article is in the cache and is replied, you’ll only see the cache mark and not the replied mark.
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
All the marking commands understand the numeric prefix.
Clear all readedness-marks from the current article
(gnus-summary-clear-mark-forward
). In other words, mark the
article as unread.
Tick the current article (gnus-summary-tick-article-forward
).
See section Article Caching.
Mark the current article as dormant
(gnus-summary-mark-as-dormant
). See section Article Caching.
Mark the current article as read
(gnus-summary-mark-as-read-forward
).
Mark the current article as read and move point to the previous line
(gnus-summary-mark-as-read-backward
).
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
).
Mark all articles that have the same subject as the current one as read
(gnus-summary-kill-same-subject
).
Mark all unread articles as read (gnus-summary-catchup
).
Mark all articles in the group as read—even the ticked and dormant
articles (gnus-summary-catchup-all
).
Catchup the current group to point (before the point)
(gnus-summary-catchup-to-here
).
Catchup the current group from point (after the point)
(gnus-summary-catchup-from-here
).
Mark all articles between point and mark as read
(gnus-summary-mark-region-as-read
).
Kill all articles with scores below the default score (or below the
numeric prefix) (gnus-summary-kill-below
).
Mark the current article as expirable
(gnus-summary-mark-as-expirable
).
Set a bookmark in the current article
(gnus-summary-set-bookmark
).
Remove the bookmark from the current article
(gnus-summary-remove-bookmark
).
Clear all marks from articles with scores over the default score (or
over the numeric prefix) (gnus-summary-clear-above
).
Tick all articles with scores over the default score (or over the
numeric prefix) (gnus-summary-tick-above
).
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
.
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Some people would like the command that ticks an article (!) to go to the next article. Others would like it to go to the next unread article. Yet others would like it to stay on the current article. And even though I haven’t heard of anybody wanting it to go to the previous (unread) article, I’m sure there are people that want that as well.
Multiply these five behaviors with five different marking commands, and you get a potentially complex set of variable to control what each command should do.
To sidestep that mess, Gnus provides commands that do all these different things. They can be found on the M M map in the summary buffer. Type M M C-h to see them all—there are too many of them to list in this manual.
While you can use these commands directly, most users would prefer altering the summary mode keymap. For instance, if you would like the ! command to go to the next article instead of the next unread article, you could say something like:
(add-hook 'gnus-summary-mode-hook 'my-alter-summary-map) (defun my-alter-summary-map () (local-set-key "!" 'gnus-summary-put-mark-as-ticked-next)) |
or
(defun my-alter-summary-map () (local-set-key "!" "MM!n")) |
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Process marks are displayed as #
in the summary buffer, and are
used for marking articles in such a way that other commands will
process these articles. For instance, if you process mark four
articles and then use the * command, Gnus will enter these four
articles into the cache. For more information,
see section Process/Prefix.
Mark the current article with the process mark
(gnus-summary-mark-as-processable
).
Remove the process mark, if any, from the current article
(gnus-summary-unmark-as-processable
).
Remove the process mark from all articles
(gnus-summary-unmark-all-processable
).
Invert the list of process marked articles
(gnus-uu-invert-processable
).
Mark articles that have a Subject
header that matches a regular
expression (gnus-uu-mark-by-regexp
).
Unmark articles that have a Subject
header that matches a regular
expression (gnus-uu-unmark-by-regexp
).
Mark articles in region (gnus-uu-mark-region
).
Unmark articles in region (gnus-uu-unmark-region
).
Mark all articles in the current (sub)thread
(gnus-uu-mark-thread
).
Unmark all articles in the current (sub)thread
(gnus-uu-unmark-thread
).
Mark all articles that have a score above the prefix argument
(gnus-uu-mark-over
).
Mark all articles in the current series (gnus-uu-mark-series
).
Mark all series that have already had some articles marked
(gnus-uu-mark-sparse
).
Mark all articles in series order (gnus-uu-mark-all
).
Mark all articles in the buffer in the order they appear
(gnus-uu-mark-buffer
).
Push the current process mark set onto the stack and unmark all articles
(gnus-summary-kill-process-mark
).
Pop the previous process mark set from the stack and restore it
(gnus-summary-yank-process-mark
).
Push the current process mark set onto the stack
(gnus-summary-save-process-mark
).
Also see the & command in Searching for Articles, for how to set process marks based on article body contents.
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
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.
Limiting commands work on subsets of the articles already fetched from the servers. These commands don’t query the server for additional articles.
Limit the summary buffer to articles that match some subject
(gnus-summary-limit-to-subject
). If given a prefix, exclude
matching articles.
Limit the summary buffer to articles that match some author
(gnus-summary-limit-to-author
). If given a prefix, exclude
matching articles.
Limit the summary buffer to articles that match some recipient
(gnus-summary-limit-to-recipient
). If given a prefix, exclude
matching articles.
Limit the summary buffer to articles in which contents of From, To or Cc
header match a given address (gnus-summary-limit-to-address
). If
given a prefix, exclude matching articles.
Limit the summary buffer to articles that aren’t part of any displayed
threads (gnus-summary-limit-to-singletons
). If given a prefix,
limit to articles that are part of displayed threads.
Limit the summary buffer to articles that match one of the “extra”
headers (see section To From Newsgroups)
(gnus-summary-limit-to-extra
). If given a prefix, exclude
matching articles.
Limit the summary buffer to articles not marked as read
(gnus-summary-limit-to-unread
). If given a prefix, limit the
buffer to articles strictly unread. This means that ticked and
dormant articles will also be excluded.
Ask for a mark and then limit to all articles that have been marked
with that mark (gnus-summary-limit-to-marks
).
Ask for a number and then limit the summary buffer to articles older than (or equal to) that number of days
(gnus-summary-limit-to-age
). If given a prefix, limit to
articles younger than that number of days.
With prefix ‘n’, limit the summary buffer to the next ‘n’
articles. If not given a prefix, use the process marked articles
instead. (gnus-summary-limit-to-articles
).
Pop the previous limit off the stack and restore it
(gnus-summary-pop-limit
). If given a prefix, pop all limits off
the stack.
Limit the summary buffer to the unseen articles
(gnus-summary-limit-to-unseen
).
Limit the summary buffer to articles that have a score at or above some
score (gnus-summary-limit-to-score
).
Limit the summary buffer to articles that satisfy the display
group parameter predicate
(gnus-summary-limit-to-display-predicate
). See section Group Parameters, for more on this predicate.
Limit the summary buffer to replied articles
(gnus-summary-limit-to-replied
). If given a prefix, exclude
replied articles.
Include all expunged articles in the limit
(gnus-summary-limit-include-expunged
).
Include all dormant articles in the limit
(gnus-summary-limit-include-dormant
).
Include all cached articles in the limit
(gnus-summary-limit-include-cached
).
Exclude all dormant articles from the limit
(gnus-summary-limit-exclude-dormant
).
Exclude all marked articles (gnus-summary-limit-exclude-marks
).
Include all the articles in the current thread in the limit.
Exclude all dormant articles that have no children from the limit
(gnus-summary-limit-exclude-childless-dormant
).
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.
Limit the summary buffer to articles that have bodies that match a
certain regexp (gnus-summary-limit-to-bodies
). If given a
prefix, reverse the limit. This command is quite slow since it
requires selecting each article to find the matches.
Like the previous command, only limit to headers instead
(gnus-summary-limit-to-headers
).
The following commands aren’t limiting commands, but use the / prefix as well.
Insert all new articles in the summary buffer. It scans for new emails
if back-end-get-new-mail
is non-nil
.
Insert all old articles in the summary buffer. If given a numbered prefix, fetch this number of articles.
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Gnus threads articles by default. To thread is to put responses to articles directly after the articles they respond to—in a hierarchical fashion.
Threading is done by looking at the References
headers of the
articles. In a perfect world, this would be enough to build pretty
trees, but unfortunately, the References
header is often broken
or simply missing. Weird news propagation exacerbates the problem,
so one has to employ other heuristics to get pleasing results. A
plethora of approaches exists, as detailed in horrible detail in
Customizing Threading.
First, a quick overview of the concepts:
The top-most article in a thread; the first article in the thread.
A tree-like article structure.
A small(er) section of this tree-like structure.
Threads often lose their roots due to article expiry, or due to the root already having been read in a previous session, and not displayed in the summary buffer. We then typically have many sub-threads that really belong to one thread, but are without connecting roots. These are called loose threads.
An attempt to gather loose threads into bigger threads.
A thread where the missing articles have been “guessed” at, and are displayed as empty lines in the summary buffer.
3.9.1 Customizing Threading | Variables you can change to affect the threading. | |
3.9.2 Thread Commands | Thread based commands in the summary buffer. |
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
3.9.1.1 Loose Threads | How Gnus gathers loose threads into bigger threads. | |
3.9.1.2 Filling In Threads | Making the threads displayed look fuller. | |
3.9.1.3 More Threading | Even more variables for fiddling with threads. | |
3.9.1.4 Low-Level Threading | You thought it was over… but you were wrong! |
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
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 section Formatting Variables.
If you want all threads to have a dummy root, even the non-gathered
ones, set gnus-summary-make-false-root-always
to t
.
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 section 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-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 subject lines. If
you think so, set this variable to, say, 20 to require that only the
first 20 characters of the subjects have to match. If you set this
variable to a really low number, you’ll find that Gnus will gather
everything in sight into one thread, which isn’t very helpful.
If you set this variable to the special value fuzzy
, Gnus will
use a fuzzy string comparison algorithm on the subjects (see section 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-simplify-subject-functions
If non-nil
, this variable overrides
gnus-summary-gather-subject-limit
. This variable should be a
list of functions to apply to the Subject
string iteratively to
arrive at the simplified version of the string.
Useful functions to put in this list include:
gnus-simplify-subject-re
Strip the leading ‘Re:’.
gnus-simplify-subject-fuzzy
Simplify fuzzily.
gnus-simplify-whitespace
Remove excessive whitespace.
gnus-simplify-all-whitespace
Remove all whitespace.
You may also write your own functions, of course.
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-ID
s in all the References
headers to find matches.
This will ensure that no gathered threads ever include unrelated
articles, but it also means that people who have posted with broken
newsreaders won’t be gathered properly. The choice is yours—plague or
cholera:
gnus-gather-threads-by-subject
This function is the default gathering function and looks at
Subject
s 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) |
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gnus-fetch-old-headers
If non-nil
, Gnus will attempt to build old threads by fetching
more old headers—headers to articles marked as read. If you would
like to display as few summary lines as possible, but still connect as
many loose threads as possible, you should set this variable to
some
or a number. If you set it to a number, no more than that
number of extra old headers will be fetched. In either case, fetching
old headers only works if the back end you are using carries overview
files—this would normally be nntp
, nnspool
,
nnml
, and nnmaildir
. Also remember that if the root of
the thread has been expired by the server, there’s not much Gnus can
do about that.
This variable can also be set to invisible
. This won’t have any
visible effects, but is useful if you use the A T command a lot
(see section Finding the Parent).
The server has to support NOV for any of this to work.
This feature can seriously impact performance it ignores all locally
cached header entries. Setting it to t
for groups for a server
that doesn’t expire articles (such as news.gmane.org), leads to very
slow summary generation.
gnus-fetch-old-ephemeral-headers
Same as gnus-fetch-old-headers
, but only used for ephemeral
newsgroups.
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
together articles that belong in the same thread. This will leave
gaps in the threading display where Gnus guesses that an article
is missing from the thread. (These gaps appear like normal summary
lines. If you select a gap, Gnus will try to fetch the article in
question.) If this variable is t
, Gnus will display all these
“gaps” without regard for whether they are useful for completing the
thread or not. Finally, if this variable is more
, Gnus won’t cut
off sparse leaf nodes that don’t lead anywhere. This variable is
nil
by default.
gnus-read-all-available-headers
This is a rather obscure variable that few will find useful. It’s intended for those non-news newsgroups where the back end has to fetch quite a lot to present the summary buffer, and where it’s impossible to go back to parents of articles. This is mostly the case in the web-based groups.
If you don’t use those, then it’s safe to leave this as the default
nil
. If you want to use this variable, it should be a regexp
that matches the group name, or t
for all groups.
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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-thread-hide-subtree
If non-nil
, all threads will be hidden when the summary buffer is
generated.
This can also be a predicate specifier (see section Predicate Specifiers).
Available predicates are gnus-article-unread-p
and
gnus-article-unseen-p
.
Here’s an example:
(setq gnus-thread-hide-subtree '(or gnus-article-unread-p gnus-article-unseen-p)) |
(It’s a pretty nonsensical example, since all unseen articles are also unread, but you get my drift.)
gnus-thread-expunge-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
, which is the default, the subject
change is ignored. If it is nil
, a change in the subject will
result in a new thread.
gnus-thread-indent-level
This is a number that says how much each sub-thread should be indented. The default is 4.
gnus-sort-gathered-threads-function
Sometimes, particularly with mailing lists, the order in which mails
arrive locally is not necessarily the same as the order in which they
arrived on the mailing list. Consequently, when sorting sub-threads
using the default gnus-thread-sort-by-number
, responses can end
up appearing before the article to which they are responding to.
Setting this variable to an alternate value
(e.g., gnus-thread-sort-by-date
), in a group’s parameters or in an
appropriate hook (e.g., gnus-summary-generate-hook
) can produce a
more logical sub-thread ordering in such instances.
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gnus-parse-headers-hook
Hook run before parsing any headers.
gnus-alter-header-function
If non-nil
, this function will be called to allow alteration of
article header structures. The function is called with one parameter,
the article header vector, which it may alter in any way. For instance,
if you have a mail-to-news gateway which alters the Message-ID
s
in systematic ways (by adding prefixes and such), you can use this
variable to un-scramble the Message-ID
s so that they are more
meaningful. Here’s one example:
(setq gnus-alter-header-function 'my-alter-message-id) (defun my-alter-message-id (header) (let ((id (mail-header-id header))) (when (string-match "\\(<[^<>@]*\\)\\.?cygnus\\..*@\\([^<>@]*>\\)" id) (mail-header-set-id (concat (match-string 1 id) "@" (match-string 2 id)) header)))) |
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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.
Lower the score of the current (sub-)thread
(gnus-summary-lower-thread
).
Increase the score of the current (sub-)thread
(gnus-summary-raise-thread
).
Set the process mark on the current (sub-)thread
(gnus-uu-mark-thread
).
Remove the process mark from the current (sub-)thread
(gnus-uu-unmark-thread
).
Toggle threading (gnus-summary-toggle-threads
).
Expose the (sub-)thread hidden under the current article, if any
(gnus-summary-show-thread
).
Hide the current (sub-)thread (gnus-summary-hide-thread
).
Expose all hidden threads (gnus-summary-show-all-threads
).
Hide all threads (gnus-summary-hide-all-threads
).
Re-thread the current article’s thread
(gnus-summary-rethread-current
). This works even when the
summary buffer is otherwise unthreaded.
Make the current article the child of the marked (or previous) article
(gnus-summary-reparent-thread
).
Make the current article the parent of the marked articles
(gnus-summary-reparent-children
).
The following commands are thread movement commands. They all understand the numeric prefix.
Go to the next thread (gnus-summary-next-thread
).
Go to the previous thread (gnus-summary-prev-thread
).
Descend the thread (gnus-summary-down-thread
).
Ascend the thread (gnus-summary-up-thread
).
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 it
is non-nil
(which it is by default), subjects will be ignored
when doing thread commands. If this variable is nil
, articles in
the same thread with different subjects will not be included in the
operation in question. If this variable is fuzzy
, only articles
that have subjects fuzzily equal will be included (see section Fuzzy Matching).
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If you are using a threaded summary display, you can sort the threads by
setting gnus-thread-sort-functions
, which can be either a single
function, a list of functions, or a list containing functions and
(not some-function)
elements.
By default, sorting is done on article numbers. Ready-made sorting
predicate functions include gnus-thread-sort-by-number
,
gnus-thread-sort-by-author
, gnus-thread-sort-by-recipient
,
gnus-thread-sort-by-subject
,
gnus-thread-sort-by-date
,
gnus-thread-sort-by-score
,
gnus-thread-sort-by-most-recent-number
,
gnus-thread-sort-by-most-recent-date
,
gnus-thread-sort-by-random
and
gnus-thread-sort-by-total-score
.
Each function takes two threads and returns non-nil
if the first
thread should be sorted before the other. Note that sorting really is
normally done by looking only at the roots of each thread. Exceptions
to this rule are gnus-thread-sort-by-most-recent-number
and
gnus-thread-sort-by-most-recent-date
.
If you use more than one function, the primary sort key should be the
last function in the list. You should probably always include
gnus-thread-sort-by-number
in the list of sorting
functions—preferably first. This will ensure that threads that are
equal with respect to the other sort criteria will be displayed in
ascending article order.
If you would like to sort by reverse score, then by subject, and finally by number, you could do something like:
(setq gnus-thread-sort-functions '(gnus-thread-sort-by-number gnus-thread-sort-by-subject (not gnus-thread-sort-by-total-score))) |
The threads that have highest score will be displayed first in the summary buffer. When threads have the same score, they will be sorted alphabetically. The threads that have the same score and the same subject will be sorted by number, which is (normally) the sequence in which the articles arrived.
If you want to sort by score and then reverse arrival order, you could say something like:
(setq gnus-thread-sort-functions '((not gnus-thread-sort-by-number) gnus-thread-sort-by-score)) |
By default, threads including their subthreads are sorted according to
the value of gnus-thread-sort-functions
. By customizing
gnus-subthread-sort-functions
you can define a custom sorting
order for subthreads. This allows for example to sort threads from
high score to low score in the summary buffer, but to have subthreads
still sorted chronologically from old to new without taking their
score into account.
The function in the gnus-thread-score-function
variable (default
+
) is used for calculating the total score of a thread. Useful
functions might be max
, min
, or squared means, or whatever
tickles your fancy.
If you are using an unthreaded display for some strange reason or
other, you have to fiddle with the gnus-article-sort-functions
variable. It is very similar to the
gnus-thread-sort-functions
, except that it uses slightly
different functions for article comparison. Available sorting
predicate functions are gnus-article-sort-by-number
,
gnus-article-sort-by-author
,
gnus-article-sort-by-subject
, gnus-article-sort-by-date
,
gnus-article-sort-by-random
, and
gnus-article-sort-by-score
.
If you want to sort an unthreaded summary display by subject, you could say something like:
(setq gnus-article-sort-functions '(gnus-article-sort-by-number gnus-article-sort-by-subject)) |
You can define group specific sorting via gnus-parameters
,
See section Group Parameters.
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If you read your news from an NNTP server that’s far away, the network latencies may make reading articles a chore. You have to wait for a while after pressing n to go to the next article before the article appears. Why can’t Gnus just go ahead and fetch the article while you are reading the previous one? Why not, indeed.
First, some caveats. There are some pitfalls to using asynchronous article fetching, especially the way Gnus does it.
Let’s say you are reading article 1, which is short, and article 2 is quite long, and you are not interested in reading that. Gnus does not know this, so it goes ahead and fetches article 2. You decide to read article 3, but since Gnus is in the process of fetching article 2, the connection is blocked.
To avoid these situations, Gnus will open two (count ’em two) connections to the server. Some people may think this isn’t a very nice thing to do, but I don’t see any real alternatives. Setting up that extra connection takes some time, so Gnus startup will be slower.
Gnus will fetch more articles than you will read. This will mean that the link between your machine and the NNTP server will become more loaded than if you didn’t use article pre-fetch. The server itself will also become more loaded—both with the extra article requests, and the extra connection.
Ok, so now you know that you shouldn’t really use this thing… unless you really want to.
Here’s how: Set gnus-asynchronous
to t
. The rest should
happen automatically.
You can control how many articles are to be pre-fetched by setting
gnus-use-article-prefetch
. This is 30 by default, which means
that when you read an article in the group, the back end will pre-fetch
the next 30 articles. If this variable is t
, the back end will
pre-fetch all the articles it can without bound. If it is
nil
, no pre-fetching will be done.
There are probably some articles that you don’t want to pre-fetch—read
articles, for instance. The gnus-async-prefetch-article-p
variable controls whether an article is to be pre-fetched. This
function should return non-nil
when the article in question is
to be pre-fetched. The default is gnus-async-unread-p
, which
returns nil
on read articles. The function is called with an
article data structure as the only parameter.
If, for instance, you wish to pre-fetch only unread articles shorter than 100 lines, you could say something like:
(defun my-async-short-unread-p (data) "Return non-nil for short, unread articles." (and (gnus-data-unread-p data) (< (mail-header-lines (gnus-data-header data)) 100))) (setq gnus-async-prefetch-article-p 'my-async-short-unread-p) |
These functions will be called many, many times, so they should preferably be short and sweet to avoid slowing down Gnus too much. It’s probably a good idea to byte-compile things like this.
After an article has been prefetched, this
gnus-async-post-fetch-function
will be called. The buffer will
be narrowed to the region of the article that was fetched. A useful
value would be -prefetch-images
, which will prefetch
and store images referenced in the article, so that you don’t have to
wait for them to be fetched when you read the article. This is useful
for HTML messages that have external images.
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)
.
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If you have an extremely slow NNTP connection, you may consider turning article caching on. Each article will then be stored locally under your home directory. As you may surmise, this could potentially use huge amounts of disk space, as well as eat up all your inodes so fast it will make your head swim. In vodka.
Used carefully, though, it could be just an easier way to save articles.
To turn caching on, set gnus-use-cache
to t
. By default,
all articles ticked or marked as dormant will then be copied
over to your local cache (gnus-cache-directory
). Whether this
cache is flat or hierarchical is controlled by the
gnus-use-long-file-name
variable, as usual.
When re-selecting a ticked or dormant article, it will be fetched from the cache instead of from the server. As articles in your cache will never expire, this might serve as a method of saving articles while still keeping them where they belong. Just mark all articles you want to save as dormant, and don’t worry.
When an article is marked as read, is it removed from the cache.
The entering/removal of articles from the cache is controlled by the
gnus-cache-enter-articles
and gnus-cache-remove-articles
variables. Both are lists of symbols. The first is (ticked
dormant)
by default, meaning that ticked and dormant articles will be
put in the cache. The latter is (read)
by default, meaning that
articles marked as read are removed from the cache. Possibly
symbols in these two lists are ticked
, dormant
,
unread
and read
.
So where does the massive article-fetching and storing come into the
picture? The gnus-jog-cache
command will go through all
subscribed newsgroups, request all unread articles, score them, and
store them in the cache. You should only ever, ever ever ever, use this
command if 1) your connection to the NNTP server is really, really,
really slow and 2) you have a really, really, really huge disk.
Seriously. One way to cut down on the number of articles downloaded is
to score unwanted articles down and have them marked as read. They will
not then be downloaded by this command.
It is likely that you do not want caching on all groups. For instance,
if your nnml
mail is located under your home directory, it makes no
sense to cache it somewhere else under your home directory. Unless you
feel that it’s neat to use twice as much space.
To limit the caching, you could set gnus-cacheable-groups
to a
regexp of groups to cache, ‘^nntp’ for instance, or set the
gnus-uncacheable-groups
regexp to ‘^nnml’, for instance.
Both variables are nil
by default. If a group matches both
variables, the group is not cached.
The cache stores information on what articles it contains in its active
file (gnus-cache-active-file
). If this file (or any other parts
of the cache) becomes all messed up for some reason or other, Gnus
offers two functions that will try to set things right. M-x
gnus-cache-generate-nov-databases will (re)build all the NOV
files, and gnus-cache-generate-active will (re)generate the active
file.
gnus-cache-move-cache
will move your whole
gnus-cache-directory
to some other location. You get asked to
where, isn’t that cool?
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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
).
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) |
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When you select an article the current article buffer will be reused
according to the value of the variable
gnus-single-article-buffer
. If its value is non-nil
(the
default) all articles reuse the same article buffer. Else each group
has its own article buffer.
This implies that it’s not possible to have more than one article buffer in a group at a time. But sometimes you might want to display all the latest emails from your mother, your father, your aunt, your uncle and your 17 cousins to coordinate the next Christmas party.
That’s where sticky articles come in handy. A sticky article buffer basically is a normal article buffer, but it won’t be reused when you select another article. You can make an article sticky with:
Make the current article sticky. If a prefix arg is given, ask for a name for this sticky article buffer.
To close a sticky article buffer you can use these commands:
Puts this sticky article buffer at the end of the list of all buffers.
Kills this sticky article buffer.
To kill all sticky article buffers you can use:
Kill all sticky article buffers. If a prefix ARG is given, ask for confirmation.
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If you have a slow connection, but the idea of using caching seems unappealing to you (and it is, really), you can help the situation some by switching on the backlog. This is where Gnus will buffer already read articles so that it doesn’t have to re-fetch articles you’ve already read. This only helps if you are in the habit of re-selecting articles you’ve recently read, of course. If you never do that, turning the backlog on will slow Gnus down a little bit, and increase memory usage some.
If you set gnus-keep-backlog
to a number n, Gnus will store
at most n old articles in a buffer for later re-fetching. If this
variable is non-nil
and is not a number, Gnus will store
all read articles, which means that your Emacs will grow without
bound before exploding and taking your machine down with you. I put
that in there just to keep y’all on your toes.
The default value is 20.
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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 section Decoding Articles).
For the commands listed here, the target is a file. If you want to
save to a group, see the B c (gnus-summary-copy-article
)
command (see section Mail Group Commands).
If gnus-save-all-headers
is non-nil
, Gnus will not delete
unwanted headers before saving the article.
If the preceding variable is nil
, all headers that match the
gnus-saved-headers
regexp will be kept, while the rest will be
deleted before saving.
Save the current article using the default article saver
(gnus-summary-save-article
).
Save the current article in a Unix mail box (mbox) file
(gnus-summary-save-article-mail
).
Save the current article in Rmail format
(gnus-summary-save-article-rmail
). This is mbox since Emacs 23,
Babyl in older versions.
Save the current article in plain file format
(gnus-summary-save-article-file
).
Write the current article in plain file format, overwriting any previous
file contents (gnus-summary-write-article-file
).
Save the current article body in plain file format
(gnus-summary-save-article-body-file
).
Save the current article in mh folder format
(gnus-summary-save-article-folder
).
Save the current article in a VM folder
(gnus-summary-save-article-vm
).
Save the current article in a pipe. Uhm, like, what I mean is—Pipe
the current article to a process (gnus-summary-pipe-output
).
If given a symbolic prefix (see section Symbolic Prefixes), include the
complete headers in the piped output. The symbolic prefix r
is
special; it lets this command pipe a raw article including all headers.
The gnus-summary-pipe-output-default-command
variable can be set
to a string containing the default command and options (default
nil
).
Save the current article into muttprint. That is, print it using the
external program Muttprint. The program name and options to use is controlled by the
variable gnus-summary-muttprint-program
.
(gnus-summary-muttprint
).
All these commands use the process/prefix convention
(see section Process/Prefix). If you save bunches of articles using these
functions, you might get tired of being prompted for files to save each
and every article in. The prompting action is controlled by
the gnus-prompt-before-saving
variable, which is always
by
default, giving you that excessive prompting action you know and
loathe. If you set this variable to t
instead, you’ll be prompted
just once for each series of articles you save. If you like to really
have Gnus do all your thinking for you, you can even set this variable
to nil
, which means that you will never be prompted for files to
save articles in. Gnus will simply save all the articles in the default
files.
You can customize the gnus-default-article-saver
variable to make
Gnus do what you want it to. You can use any of the eight ready-made
functions below, or you can create your own.
gnus-summary-save-in-rmail
This is the default format, that used by the Rmail package. Since Emacs
23, Rmail uses standard mbox format. Before this, it used the
Babyl format. Accordingly, this command writes mbox format since
Emacs 23, unless appending to an existing Babyl file. In older versions
of Emacs, it always uses Babyl format. 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-write-to-file
Write the article straight to an ordinary file. The file is
overwritten if it exists. 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-write-body-to-file
Write the article body straight to an ordinary file. The file is
overwritten if it exists. 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
, which creates capitalized names.
gnus-summary-save-in-vm
Save the article in a VM folder. You have to have the VM mail reader to use this setting.
gnus-summary-save-in-pipe
Pipe the article to a shell command. This function takes optional two arguments COMMAND and RAW. Valid values for COMMAND include:
nil
default
gnus-summary-pipe-output-default-command
holds or the command
last used for saving.
Non-nil
value for RAW overrides :decode
and
:headers
properties (see below) and the raw article including all
headers will be piped.
The symbol of each function may have the following properties:
:decode
The value non-nil
means save decoded articles. This is
meaningful only with gnus-summary-save-in-file
,
gnus-summary-save-body-in-file
,
gnus-summary-write-to-file
,
gnus-summary-write-body-to-file
, and
gnus-summary-save-in-pipe
.
:function
The value specifies an alternative function which appends, not
overwrites, articles to a file. This implies that when saving many
articles at a time, gnus-prompt-before-saving
is bound to
t
and all articles are saved in a single file. This is
meaningful only with gnus-summary-write-to-file
and
gnus-summary-write-body-to-file
.
:headers
The value specifies the symbol of a variable of which the value
specifies headers to be saved. If it is omitted,
gnus-save-all-headers
and gnus-saved-headers
control what
headers should be saved.
All of these functions, except for the last one, will save the article
in the gnus-article-save-directory
, which is initialized from the
SAVEDIR
environment variable. This is ‘~/News/’ by
default.
As you can see above, the functions use different functions to find a suitable name of a file to save the article in. Below is a list of available functions that generate names:
gnus-Numeric-save-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’.
gnus-sender-save-name
File names like ‘~/News/larsi’.
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
eval
ed). If any of these actions have a non-nil
result,
the file will be used as a default prompt. In addition, the
result of the operation itself will be used if the function or form
called returns a string or a list of strings.
You basically end up with a list of file names that might be used when saving the current article. (All “matches” will be used.) You will then be prompted for what you really want to use as a name, with file name completion over the results from applying this variable.
This variable is ((gnus-article-archive-name))
by default, which
means that Gnus will look at the articles it saves for an
Archive-name
line and use that as a suggestion for the file
name.
Here’s an example function to clean up file names somewhat. If you have lots of mail groups called things like ‘nnml:mail.whatever’, you may want to chop off the beginning of these group names before creating the file name to save to. The following will do just that:
(defun my-save-name (group) (when (string-match "^nnml:mail." group) (substring group (match-end 0)))) (setq gnus-split-methods '((gnus-article-archive-name) (my-save-name))) |
Finally, you have the gnus-use-long-file-name
variable. If it is
nil
, all the preceding functions will replace all periods
(‘.’) in the group names with slashes (‘/’)—which means that
the functions will generate hierarchies of directories instead of having
all the files in the top level directory
(‘~/News/alt/andrea-dworkin’ instead of
‘~/News/alt.andrea-dworkin’.) This variable is t
by default
on most systems. However, for historical reasons, this is nil
on
Xenix and usg-unix-v machines by default.
This function also affects kill and score file names. If this variable
is a list, and the list contains the element not-score
, long file
names will not be used for score files, if it contains the element
not-save
, long file names will not be used for saving, and if it
contains the element not-kill
, long file names will not be used
for kill files.
If you’d like to save articles in a hierarchy that looks something like a spool, you could
(setq gnus-use-long-file-name '(not-save)) ; to get a hierarchy (setq gnus-default-article-saver 'gnus-summary-save-in-file) ; no encoding |
Then just save with o. You’d then read this hierarchy with
ephemeral nneething
groups—G D in the group buffer, and
the top level directory as the argument (‘~/News/’). Then just walk
around to the groups/directories with nneething
.
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
Sometime users post articles (or series of articles) that have been encoded in some way or other. Gnus can decode them for you.
3.17.1 Uuencoded Articles | Uudecode articles. | |
3.17.2 Shell Archives | Unshar articles. | |
3.17.3 PostScript Files | Split PostScript. | |
3.17.4 Other Files | Plain save and binhex. | |
3.17.5 Decoding Variables | Variables for a happy decoding. | |
3.17.6 Viewing Files | You want to look at the result of the decoding? |
All these functions use the process/prefix convention (see section Process/Prefix) for finding out what articles to work on, with the extension that a “single article” means “a single series”. Gnus can find out by itself what articles belong to a series, decode all the articles and unpack/view/save the resulting file(s).
Gnus guesses what articles are in the series according to the following simplish rule: The subjects must be (nearly) identical, except for the last two numbers of the line. (Spaces are largely ignored, however.)
For example: If you choose a subject called ‘cat.gif (2/3)’, Gnus will find all the articles that match the regexp ‘^cat.gif ([0-9]+/[0-9]+).*$’.
Subjects that are non-standard, like ‘cat.gif (2/3) Part 6 of a series’, will not be properly recognized by any of the automatic viewing commands, and you have to mark the articles manually with #.
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
Uudecodes the current series (gnus-uu-decode-uu
).
Uudecodes and saves the current series
(gnus-uu-decode-uu-and-save
).
Uudecodes and views the current series (gnus-uu-decode-uu-view
).
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 section 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.
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
Shell archives (“shar files”) used to be a popular way to distribute sources, but it isn’t used all that much today. In any case, we have some commands to deal with these:
Unshars the current series (gnus-uu-decode-unshar
).
Unshars and saves the current series (gnus-uu-decode-unshar-and-save
).
Unshars and views the current series (gnus-uu-decode-unshar-view
).
Unshars, views and saves the current series
(gnus-uu-decode-unshar-and-save-view
).
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
Unpack the current PostScript series (gnus-uu-decode-postscript
).
Unpack and save the current PostScript series
(gnus-uu-decode-postscript-and-save
).
View the current PostScript series
(gnus-uu-decode-postscript-view
).
View and save the current PostScript series
(gnus-uu-decode-postscript-and-save-view
).
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
Save the current series
(gnus-uu-decode-save
).
Unbinhex the current series (gnus-uu-decode-binhex
). This
doesn’t really work yet.
yEnc-decode the current series and save it (gnus-uu-decode-yenc
).
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
Adjective, not verb.
3.17.5.1 Rule Variables | Variables that say how a file is to be viewed. | |
3.17.5.2 Other Decode Variables | Other decode variables. | |
3.17.5.3 Uuencoding and Posting | Variables for customizing uuencoding. |
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
Gnus uses rule variables to decide how to view a file. All these variables are of the form
(list '(regexp1 command2) '(regexp2 command2) ...) |
gnus-uu-user-view-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.
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
gnus-uu-grabbed-file-functions
All functions in this list will be called right after 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
kludgy.
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 unsuccessfully
decoded articles 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-pre-uudecode-hook
Hook run before sending a message to uudecode
.
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 RFC 1153—no easy way
to specify any meaningful volume and issue numbers were found, so I
simply dropped them.
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
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 is able
to follow threads when collecting uuencoded articles. (Well, I have
seen one package that does that—gnus-uu
, but somehow, I don’t
think that counts…) Default is nil
.
gnus-uu-post-separate-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
.
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
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?
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
Reading through this huge manual, you may have quite forgotten that the object of newsreaders is to actually, like, read what people have written. Reading articles. Unfortunately, people are quite bad at writing, so there are tons of functions and variables to make reading these articles easier.
3.18.1 Article Highlighting | You want to make the article look like fruit salad. | |
3.18.2 Article Fontisizing | Making emphasized text look nice. | |
3.18.3 Article Hiding | You also want to make certain info go away. | |
3.18.4 Article Washing | Lots of way-neat functions to make life better. | |
3.18.5 Article Header | Doing various header transformations. | |
3.18.6 Article Buttons | Click on URLs, Message-IDs, addresses and the like. | |
3.18.7 Article button levels | Controlling appearance of buttons. | |
3.18.8 Article Date | Grumble, UT! | |
3.18.9 Article Display | Display various stuff: X-Face, Picons, Gravatars, Smileys. | |
3.18.10 Article Signature | What is a signature? | |
3.18.11 Article Miscellanea | Various other stuff. |
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
Not only do you want your article buffer to look like fruit salad, but you want it to look like technicolor fruit salad.
Do much highlighting of the current article
(gnus-article-highlight
). This function highlights header, cited
text, the signature, and adds buttons to the body and the head.
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
(see section Faces and Fonts) and content is the face for highlighting
the header value. The first match made will be used. Note that
regexp shouldn’t have ‘^’ prepended—Gnus will add one.
Highlight cited text (gnus-article-highlight-citation
).
Some variables to customize the citation highlights:
gnus-cite-parse-max-size
If the article size in bytes is bigger than this variable (which is 25000 by default), no citation highlighting will be performed.
gnus-cite-max-prefix
Maximum possible length for a citation prefix (default 20).
gnus-cite-face-list
List of faces used for highlighting citations (see section Faces and Fonts). 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.
gnus-cite-ignore-quoted-from
If non-nil
, no citation highlighting will be performed on lines
beginning with ‘>From ’. Those lines may have been quoted by MTAs
in order not to mix up with the envelope From line. The default value
is t
.
Highlight the signature (gnus-article-highlight-signature
).
Everything after gnus-signature-separator
(see section Article Signature) in an article will be considered a signature and will be
highlighted with gnus-signature-face
, which is italic
by
default.
See section Customizing Articles, for how to highlight articles automatically.
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
People commonly add emphasis to words in news articles by writing things
like ‘_this_’ or ‘*this*’ or ‘/this/’. Gnus can make
this look nicer by running the article through the W e
(gnus-article-emphasize
) command.
How the emphasis is computed is controlled by the
gnus-emphasis-alist
variable. This is an alist where the first
element is a regular expression to be matched. The second is a number
that says what regular expression grouping is used to find the entire
emphasized word. The third is a number that says what regexp grouping
should be displayed and highlighted. (The text between these two
groupings will be hidden.) The fourth is the face used for
highlighting.
(setq gnus-emphasis-alist '(("_\\(\\w+\\)_" 0 1 gnus-emphasis-underline) ("\\*\\(\\w+\\)\\*" 0 1 gnus-emphasis-bold))) |
By default, there are seven rules, and they use the following faces:
gnus-emphasis-bold
, gnus-emphasis-italic
,
gnus-emphasis-underline
, gnus-emphasis-bold-italic
,
gnus-emphasis-underline-italic
,
gnus-emphasis-underline-bold
, and
gnus-emphasis-underline-bold-italic
.
If you want to change these faces, you can either use M-x
customize, or you can use copy-face
. For instance, if you want
to make gnus-emphasis-italic
use a red face instead, you could
say something like:
(copy-face 'red 'gnus-emphasis-italic) |
If you want to highlight arbitrary words, you can use the
gnus-group-highlight-words-alist
variable, which uses the same
syntax as gnus-emphasis-alist
. The highlight-words
group
parameter (see section Group Parameters) can also be used.
See section Customizing Articles, for how to fontize articles automatically.
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
Or rather, hiding certain things in each article. There usually is much too much cruft in most articles.
Do quite a lot of hiding on the article buffer (gnus-article-hide). In particular, this function will hide headers, PGP, cited text and the signature.
Hide headers (gnus-article-hide-headers
). See section Hiding Headers.
Hide headers that aren’t particularly interesting
(gnus-article-hide-boring-headers
). See section Hiding Headers.
Hide signature (gnus-article-hide-signature
). See section Article Signature.
Strip list identifiers specified in gnus-list-identifiers
. These
are strings some mailing list servers add to the beginning of all
Subject
headers—for example, ‘[zebra 4711]’. Any leading
‘Re: ’ is skipped before stripping. gnus-list-identifiers
may not contain \\(..\\)
.
gnus-list-identifiers
A regular expression that matches list identifiers to be removed from subject. This can also be a list of regular expressions.
Hide PEM (privacy enhanced messages) cruft
(gnus-article-hide-pem
).
Strip the banner specified by the banner
group parameter
(gnus-article-strip-banner
). This is mainly used to hide those
annoying banners and/or signatures that some mailing lists and moderated
groups adds to all the messages. The way to use this function is to add
the banner
group parameter (see section Group Parameters) to the
group you want banners stripped from. The parameter either be a string,
which will be interpreted as a regular expression matching text to be
removed, or the symbol signature
, meaning that the (last)
signature should be removed, or other symbol, meaning that the
corresponding regular expression in gnus-article-banner-alist
is
used.
For instance:
(setq gnus-article-banner-alist ((googleGroups . "^\n*--~--~---------\\(.+\n\\)+"))) |
Regardless of a group, you can hide things like advertisements only when
the sender of an article has a certain mail address specified in
gnus-article-address-banner-alist
.
gnus-article-address-banner-alist
Alist of mail addresses and banners. Each element has the form
(address . banner)
, where address is a regexp
matching a mail address in the From header, banner is one of a
symbol signature
, an item in gnus-article-banner-alist
,
a regexp and nil
. If address matches author’s mail
address, it will remove things like advertisements. For example, if a
sender has the mail address ‘hail@yoo-hoo.co.jp’ and there is a
banner something like ‘Do You Yoo-hoo!?’ in all articles he
sends, you can use the following element to remove them:
("@yoo-hoo\\.co\\.jp\\'" . "\n_+\nDo You Yoo-hoo!\\?\n.*\n.*\n") |
Hide citation (gnus-article-hide-citation
). Some variables for
customizing the hiding:
gnus-cited-opened-text-button-line-format
gnus-cited-closed-text-button-line-format
Gnus adds buttons to show where the cited text has been hidden, and to allow toggle hiding the text. The format of the variable is specified by these format-like variable (see section Formatting Variables). These specs are valid:
Starting point of the hidden text.
Ending point of the hidden text.
Number of characters in the hidden region.
Number of lines of hidden text.
gnus-cited-lines-visible
The number of lines at the beginning of the cited text to leave shown. This can also be a cons cell with the number of lines at the top and bottom of the text, respectively, to remain visible.
Hide citation (gnus-article-hide-citation-maybe
) depending on the
following two variables:
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 have at least this length (default 10) before it is hidden.
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
have happen automatically (see section 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 section Article Highlighting for further variables for citation customization.
See section Customizing Articles, for how to hide article elements automatically.
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
We call this “article washing” for a really good reason. Namely, the A key was taken, so we had to use the W key instead.
Washing is defined by us as “changing something from something to something else”, but normally results in something looking better. Cleaner, perhaps.
See section Customizing Articles, if you want to change how Gnus displays articles by default.
This is not really washing, it’s sort of the opposite of washing. If you type this, you see the article exactly as it exists on disk or on the server.
Force redisplaying of the current article
(gnus-summary-show-article
). This is also not really washing.
If you type this, you see the article without any previously applied
interactive Washing functions but with all default treatments
(see section Customizing Articles).
Remove page breaks from the current article
(gnus-summary-stop-page-breaking
). See section Misc Article, for page
delimiters.
Do a Caesar rotate (rot13) on the article buffer
(gnus-summary-caesar-message
).
Unreadable articles that tell you to read them with Caesar rotate or rot13.
(Typically offensive jokes and such.)
It’s commonly called “rot13” because each letter is rotated 13 positions in the alphabet, e.g., ‘B’ (letter #2) -> ‘O’ (letter #15). It is sometimes referred to as “Caesar rotate” because Caesar is rumored to have employed this form of, uh, somewhat weak encryption.
Morse decode the article buffer (gnus-summary-morse-message
).
Decode IDNA encoded domain names in the current articles. IDNA encoded domain names looks like ‘xn--bar’. If a string remain unencoded after running invoking this, it is likely an invalid IDNA string (‘xn--bar’ is invalid). You must have GNU Libidn (http://www.gnu.org/software/libidn/) installed for this command to work.
Toggle whether to display all headers in the article buffer
(gnus-summary-toggle-header
).
Toggle whether to display all headers in the article buffer permanently
(gnus-summary-verbose-headers
).
Treat overstrike (gnus-article-treat-overstrike
).
Treat M****s*** sm*rtq**t*s according to
gnus-article-dumbquotes-map
(gnus-article-treat-dumbquotes
). Note that this function guesses
whether a character is a sm*rtq**t* or not, so it should only be used
interactively.
Sm*rtq**t*s are M****s***’s unilateral extension to the character map in
an attempt to provide more quoting characters. If you see something
like \222
or \264
where you’re expecting some kind of
apostrophe or quotation mark, then try this wash.
Translate many non-ASCII characters into their
ASCII equivalents (gnus-article-treat-non-ascii
).
This is mostly useful if you’re on a terminal that has a limited font
and doesn’t show accented characters, “advanced” punctuation, and the
like. For instance, ‘»’ is translated into ‘>>’, and so on.
Full deuglify of broken Outlook (Express) articles: Treat dumbquotes,
unwrap lines, repair attribution and rearrange citation.
(gnus-article-outlook-deuglify-article
).
Unwrap lines that appear to be wrapped citation lines. You can control
what lines will be unwrapped by frobbing
gnus-outlook-deuglify-unwrap-min
and
gnus-outlook-deuglify-unwrap-max
, indicating the minimum and
maximum length of an unwrapped citation line.
(gnus-article-outlook-unwrap-lines
).
Repair a broken attribution line.
(gnus-article-outlook-repair-attribution
).
Repair broken citations by rearranging the text.
(gnus-article-outlook-rearrange-citation
).
Do word wrap (gnus-article-fill-cited-article
).
You can give the command a numerical prefix to specify the width to use when filling.
Fill long lines (gnus-article-fill-long-lines
).
Capitalize the first word in each sentence
(gnus-article-capitalize-sentences
).
Translate CRLF pairs (i.e., ‘^M’s on the end of the lines) into LF
(this takes care of DOS line endings), and then translate any remaining
CRs into LF (this takes care of Mac line endings)
(gnus-article-remove-cr
).
Treat quoted-printable (gnus-article-de-quoted-unreadable
).
Quoted-Printable is one common MIME encoding employed when
sending non-ASCII (i.e., 8-bit) articles. It typically
makes strings like ‘déjà vu’ look like ‘d=E9j=E0 vu’,
which doesn’t look very readable to me. Note that this is usually
done automatically by Gnus if the message in question has a
Content-Transfer-Encoding
header that says that this encoding
has been done. If a prefix is given, a charset will be asked for.
Treat base64 (gnus-article-de-base64-unreadable
). Base64 is
one common MIME encoding employed when sending
non-ASCII (i.e., 8-bit) articles. Note that this is
usually done automatically by Gnus if the message in question has a
Content-Transfer-Encoding
header that says that this encoding
has been done. If a prefix is given, a charset will be asked for.
Treat HZ or HZP (gnus-article-decode-HZ
). HZ (or HZP) is one
common encoding employed when sending Chinese articles. It typically
makes strings look like ‘~{<:Ky2;S{#,NpJ)l6HK!#~}’.
Translate ANSI SGR control sequences into overlays or
extents (gnus-article-treat-ansi-sequences
). ANSI
sequences are used in some Chinese hierarchies for highlighting.
Remove newlines from within URLs. Some mailers insert newlines into
outgoing email messages to keep lines short. This reformatting can
split long URLs onto multiple lines. Repair those URLs by removing
the newlines (gnus-article-unsplit-urls
).
Treat HTML (gnus-article-wash-html
). Note that this is
usually done automatically by Gnus if the message in question has a
Content-Type
header that says that the message is HTML.
If a prefix is given, a charset will be asked for. If it is a number,
the charset defined in gnus-summary-show-article-charset-alist
(see section Scrolling the Article) will be used.
The default is to use the function specified by
mm-text-html-renderer
(see (emacs-mime)Display Customization section ‘Display Customization’ in The Emacs MIME Manual) to convert the
HTML. Pre-defined functions you can use include:
Add clickable buttons to the article (gnus-article-add-buttons
).
See section Article Buttons.
Add clickable buttons to the article headers
(gnus-article-add-buttons-to-head
).
Verify a signed control message
(gnus-article-verify-x-pgp-sig
). Control messages such as
newgroup
and checkgroups
are usually signed by the
hierarchy maintainer. You need to add the PGP public key of
the maintainer to your keyring to verify the
message.(1)
Verify a signed (PGP, PGP/MIME or
S/MIME) message
(gnus-summary-force-verify-and-decrypt
). See section Security.
Strip headers like the X-No-Archive
header from the beginning of
article bodies (gnus-article-strip-headers-in-body
).
Remove all blank lines from the beginning of the article
(gnus-article-strip-leading-blank-lines
).
Replace all blank lines with empty lines and then all multiple empty
lines with a single empty line.
(gnus-article-strip-multiple-blank-lines
).
Remove all blank lines at the end of the article
(gnus-article-remove-trailing-blank-lines
).
Do all the three commands above
(gnus-article-strip-blank-lines
).
Remove all blank lines
(gnus-article-strip-all-blank-lines
).
Remove all white space from the beginning of all lines of the article
body (gnus-article-strip-leading-space
).
Remove all white space from the end of all lines of the article
body (gnus-article-strip-trailing-space
).
See section Customizing Articles, for how to wash articles automatically.
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These commands perform various transformations of article header.
Unfold folded header lines (gnus-article-treat-unfold-headers
).
Fold the Newsgroups
and Followup-To
headers
(gnus-article-treat-fold-newsgroups
).
Fold all the message headers
(gnus-article-treat-fold-headers
).
Remove excessive whitespace from all headers
(gnus-article-remove-leading-whitespace
).
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People often include references to other stuff in articles, and it would be nice if Gnus could just fetch whatever it is that people talk about with the minimum of fuzz when you hit RET or use the middle mouse button on these references.
Gnus adds buttons to certain standard references by default: Well-formed URLs, mail addresses, Message-IDs, Info links, man pages and Emacs or Gnus related references. This is controlled by two variables, one that handles article bodies and one that handles article heads:
gnus-button-alist
This is an alist where each entry has this form:
(regexp button-par use-p function data-par) |
All text that match this regular expression (case insensitive) will be
considered an external reference. Here’s a typical regexp that matches
embedded URLs: ‘<URL:\\([^\n\r>]*\\)>’. This can also be a
variable containing a regexp, useful variables to use include
gnus-button-url-regexp
and gnus-button-mid-or-mail-regexp
.
Gnus has to know which parts of the matches is to be highlighted. This is a number that says what sub-expression of the regexp is to be highlighted. If you want it all highlighted, you use 0 here.
This form will be eval
ed, and if the result is non-nil
,
this is considered a match. This is useful if you want extra sifting to
avoid false matches. Often variables named
gnus-button-*-level
are used here, See section Article button levels, but any other form may be used too.
This function will be called when you click on this button.
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.
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
gnus-button-*-level
See section Article button levels.
gnus-button-url-regexp
A regular expression that matches embedded URLs. It is used in the default values of the variables above.
gnus-button-man-handler
The function to use for displaying man pages. It must take at least one argument with a string naming the man page.
gnus-button-mid-or-mail-regexp
Regular expression that matches a message ID or a mail address.
gnus-button-prefer-mid-or-mail
This variable determines what to do when the button on a string as
‘foo123@bar.invalid’ is pushed. Strings like this can be either a
message ID or a mail address. If it is one of the symbols mid
or
mail
, Gnus will always assume that the string is a message ID or
a mail address, respectively. If this variable is set to the symbol
ask
, always query the user what to do. If it is a function, this
function will be called with the string as its only argument. The
function must return mid
, mail
, invalid
or
ask
. The default value is the function
gnus-button-mid-or-mail-heuristic
.
gnus-button-mid-or-mail-heuristic
Function that guesses whether its argument is a message ID or a mail
address. Returns mid
if it’s a message IDs, mail
if
it’s a mail address, ask
if unsure and invalid
if the
string is invalid.
gnus-button-mid-or-mail-heuristic-alist
An alist of (RATE . REGEXP)
pairs used by the function
gnus-button-mid-or-mail-heuristic
.
gnus-article-button-face
Face used on buttons.
gnus-article-mouse-face
Face used when the mouse cursor is over a button.
See section Customizing Articles, for how to buttonize articles automatically.
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
The higher the value of the variables gnus-button-*-level
,
the more buttons will appear. If the level is zero, no corresponding
buttons are displayed. With the default value (which is 5) you should
already see quite a lot of buttons. With higher levels, you will see
more buttons, but you may also get more false positives. To avoid them,
you can set the variables gnus-button-*-level
local to
specific groups (see section Group Parameters). Here’s an example for the
variable gnus-parameters
:
;; increase |
gnus-button-browse-level
Controls the display of references to message IDs, mail addresses and
news URLs. Related variables and functions include
gnus-button-url-regexp
, browse-url
, and
browse-url-browser-function
.
gnus-button-emacs-level
Controls the display of Emacs or Gnus references. Related functions are
gnus-button-handle-custom
,
gnus-button-handle-describe-function
,
gnus-button-handle-describe-variable
,
gnus-button-handle-symbol
,
gnus-button-handle-describe-key
,
gnus-button-handle-apropos
,
gnus-button-handle-apropos-command
,
gnus-button-handle-apropos-variable
,
gnus-button-handle-apropos-documentation
, and
gnus-button-handle-library
.
gnus-button-man-level
Controls the display of references to (Unix) man pages.
See gnus-button-man-handler
.
gnus-button-message-level
Controls the display of message IDs, mail addresses and news URLs.
Related variables and functions include
gnus-button-mid-or-mail-regexp
,
gnus-button-prefer-mid-or-mail
,
gnus-button-mid-or-mail-heuristic
, and
gnus-button-mid-or-mail-heuristic-alist
.
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
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.
Display the date in UT (aka. GMT, aka ZULU)
(gnus-article-date-ut
).
Display the date in international format, aka. ISO 8601
(gnus-article-date-iso8601
).
Display the date in the local timezone (gnus-article-date-local
).
Display the date in a format that’s easily pronounceable in English
(gnus-article-date-english
).
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 of possible format specs.
Say how much time has elapsed between the article was posted and now
(gnus-article-date-lapsed
). It looks something like:
Date: 6 weeks, 4 days, 1 hour, 3 minutes, 8 seconds ago |
To make this line updated continually, set the
gnus-article-update-date-headers
variable to the frequency in
seconds (the default is nil
).
Display the original date (gnus-article-date-original
). This can
be useful if you normally use some other conversion function and are
worried that it might be doing something totally wrong. Say, claiming
that the article was posted in 1854. Although something like that is
totally impossible. Don’t you trust me? *titter*
See section Customizing Articles, for how to display the date in your preferred format automatically.
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
These commands add various frivolous display gimmicks to the article buffer in Emacs versions that support them.
X-Face
headers are small black-and-white images supplied by the
message headers (see section X-Face).
Face
headers are small colored images supplied by the message
headers (see section Face).
Smileys are those little ‘:-)’ symbols that people like to litter their messages with (see section Smileys).
Picons, on the other hand, reside on your own system, and Gnus will try to match the headers to what you have (see section Picons).
Gravatars reside on-line and are fetched from http://www.gravatar.com/ (see section Gravatars).
All these functions are toggles—if the elements already exist, they’ll be removed.
Display an X-Face
in the From
header.
(gnus-article-display-x-face
).
Display a Face
in the From
header.
(gnus-article-display-face
).
Display smileys (gnus-treat-smiley
).
Piconify the From
header (gnus-treat-from-picon
).
Piconify all mail headers (i.e., Cc
, To
)
(gnus-treat-mail-picon
).
Piconify all news headers (i.e., Newsgroups
and
Followup-To
) (gnus-treat-newsgroups-picon
).
Gravatarify the From
header (gnus-treat-from-gravatar
).
Gravatarify all mail headers (i.e., Cc
, To
)
(gnus-treat-from-gravatar
).
Remove all images from the article buffer
(gnus-article-remove-images
).
If you’re reading an HTML article rendered with
gnus-article-html
, then you can insert any blocked images in
the buffer with this command.
(-show-images
).
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
Each article is divided into two parts—the head and the body. The
body can be divided into a signature part and a text part. The variable
that says what is to be considered a signature is
gnus-signature-separator
. This is normally the standard
‘^-- $’ as mandated by son-of-RFC 1036. However, many people use
non-standard signature separators, so this variable can also be a list
of regular expressions to be tested, one by one. (Searches are done
from the end of the body towards the beginning.) One likely value is:
(setq gnus-signature-separator '("^-- $" ; The standard "^-- *$" ; A common mangling "^-------*$" ; Many people just use a looong ; line of dashes. Shame! "^ *--------*$" ; Double-shame! "^________*$" ; Underscores are also popular "^========*$")) ; Pervert! |
The more permissive you are, the more likely it is that you’ll get false positives.
gnus-signature-limit
provides a limit to what is considered a
signature when displaying articles.
nil
, there is no signature in the buffer.
This variable can also be a list where the elements may be of the types listed above. Here’s an example:
(setq gnus-signature-limit '(200.0 "^---*Forwarded article")) |
This means that if there are more than 200 lines after the signature separator, or the text after the signature separator is matched by the regular expression ‘^---*Forwarded article’, then it isn’t a signature after all.
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Translate the article from one language to another
(gnus-article-babel
).
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
The following commands all understand the numerical prefix. For instance, 3 K v means “view the third MIME part”.
View the MIME part.
Save the MIME part.
Prompt for a file name, then save the MIME part and strip it from the article. The stripped MIME object will be referred via the message/external-body MIME type.
Replace the MIME part with an external body.
Delete the MIME part and add some information about the removed part.
Copy the MIME part.
View the MIME part externally.
View the MIME part internally.
Pipe the MIME part to an external command.
The rest of these MIME commands do not use the numerical prefix in the same manner:
View ‘text/html’ parts of the current article with a WWW browser.
Inline images embedded in a message using the cid
scheme, as they
are generally considered to be safe, will be processed properly. The
message header is added to the beginning of every HTML part
unless the prefix argument is given.
Warning: Spammers use links to images (using the http
scheme) in
HTML articles to verify whether you have read the message. As
this command passes the HTML content to the browser without
eliminating these “web bugs” you should only use it for mails from
trusted senders.
If you always want to display HTML parts in the browser, set
mm-text-html-renderer
to nil
.
This command creates temporary files to pass HTML contents including images if any to the browser, and deletes them when exiting the group (if you want).
Make all the MIME parts have buttons in front of them. This is mostly useful if you wish to save (or perform other actions) on inlined parts.
Display MIME part buttons in the end of the header of an
article (gnus-mime-buttonize-attachments-in-header
). This
command toggles the display. Note that buttons to be added to the
header are only the ones that aren’t inlined in the body. If you want
those buttons always to be displayed, set
gnus-mime-display-attachment-buttons-in-header
to non-nil
.
The default is t
. To change the appearance of buttons, customize
gnus-header-face-alist
.
Some multipart messages are transmitted with missing or faulty headers.
This command will attempt to “repair” these messages so that they can
be viewed in a more pleasant manner
(gnus-summary-repair-multipart
).
Save all parts matching a MIME type to a directory
(gnus-summary-save-parts
). Understands the process/prefix
convention (see section Process/Prefix).
Toggle the buttonized display of the article buffer
(gnus-summary-toggle-display-buttonized
).
Decode RFC 2047-encoded words in the article headers
(gnus-article-decode-mime-words
).
Decode encoded article bodies as well as charsets
(gnus-article-decode-charset
).
This command looks in the Content-Type
header to determine the
charset. If there is no such header in the article, you can give it a
prefix, which will prompt for the charset to decode as. In regional
groups where people post using some common encoding (but do not
include MIME headers), you can set the charset
group/topic
parameter to the required charset (see section Group Parameters).
View all the MIME parts in the current article
(gnus-mime-view-all-parts
).
Relevant variables:
gnus-ignored-mime-types
This is a list of regexps. MIME types that match a regexp from
this list will be completely ignored by Gnus. The default value is
nil
.
To have all Vcards be ignored, you’d say something like this:
(setq gnus-ignored-mime-types '("text/x-vcard")) |
gnus-article-loose-mime
If non-nil
, Gnus won’t require the ‘MIME-Version’ header
before interpreting the message as a MIME message. This helps
when reading messages from certain broken mail user agents. The
default is t
.
gnus-article-emulate-mime
There are other, non-MIME encoding methods used. The most common
is ‘uuencode’, but yEncode is also getting to be popular. If
this variable is non-nil
, Gnus will look in message bodies to
see if it finds these encodings, and if so, it’ll run them through the
Gnus MIME machinery. The default is t
. Only
single-part yEnc encoded attachments can be decoded. There’s no support
for encoding in Gnus.
gnus-unbuttonized-mime-types
This is a list of regexps. MIME types that match a regexp from
this list won’t have MIME buttons inserted unless they aren’t
displayed or this variable is overridden by
gnus-buttonized-mime-types
. The default value is
(".*/.*")
. This variable is only used when
gnus-inhibit-mime-unbuttonizing
is nil
.
gnus-buttonized-mime-types
This is a list of regexps. MIME types that match a regexp from
this list will have MIME buttons inserted unless they aren’t
displayed. This variable overrides
gnus-unbuttonized-mime-types
. The default value is nil
.
This variable is only used when gnus-inhibit-mime-unbuttonizing
is nil
.
E.g., to see security buttons but no other buttons, you could set this
variable to ("multipart/signed")
and leave
gnus-unbuttonized-mime-types
at the default value.
You could also add "multipart/alternative"
to this list to
display radio buttons that allow you to choose one of two media types
those mails include. See also mm-discouraged-alternatives
(see (emacs-mime)Display Customization section ‘Display Customization’ in The Emacs MIME Manual).
gnus-inhibit-mime-unbuttonizing
If this is non-nil
, then all MIME parts get buttons. The
default value is nil
.
gnus-article-mime-part-function
For each MIME part, this function will be called with the MIME handle as the parameter. The function is meant to be used to allow users to gather information from the article (e.g., add Vcard info to the bbdb database) or to do actions based on parts (e.g., automatically save all jpegs into some directory).
Here’s an example function the does the latter:
(defun my-save-all-jpeg-parts (handle) (when (equal (car (mm-handle-type handle)) "image/jpeg") (with-temp-buffer (insert (mm-get-part handle)) (write-region (point-min) (point-max) (read-file-name "Save jpeg to: "))))) (setq gnus-article-mime-part-function 'my-save-all-jpeg-parts) |
gnus-mime-multipart-functions
Alist of MIME multipart types and functions to handle them.
gnus-mime-display-multipart-alternative-as-mixed
Display "multipart/alternative" parts as "multipart/mixed".
gnus-mime-display-multipart-related-as-mixed
Display "multipart/related" parts as "multipart/mixed".
If displaying ‘text/html’ is discouraged, see
mm-discouraged-alternatives
, images or other material inside a
"multipart/related" part might be overlooked when this variable is
nil
. Display Customization: (emacs-mime)Display Customization section ‘Display Customization’ in Emacs-Mime Manual.
gnus-mime-display-multipart-as-mixed
Display "multipart" parts as "multipart/mixed". If t
, it
overrides nil
values of
gnus-mime-display-multipart-alternative-as-mixed
and
gnus-mime-display-multipart-related-as-mixed
.
mm-file-name-rewrite-functions
List of functions used for rewriting file names of MIME parts. Each function takes a file name as input and returns a file name.
Ready-made functions include
mm-file-name-delete-whitespace
,
mm-file-name-trim-whitespace
,
mm-file-name-collapse-whitespace
, and
mm-file-name-replace-whitespace
. The later uses the value of
the variable mm-file-name-replace-whitespace
to replace each
whitespace character in a file name with that string; default value
is "_"
(a single underscore).
The standard functions capitalize
, downcase
,
upcase
, and upcase-initials
may be useful, too.
Everybody knows that whitespace characters in file names are evil, except those who don’t know. If you receive lots of attachments from such unenlightened users, you can make live easier by adding
(setq mm-file-name-rewrite-functions '(mm-file-name-trim-whitespace mm-file-name-collapse-whitespace mm-file-name-replace-whitespace)) |
to your ‘~/.gnus.el’ file.
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People use different charsets, and we have MIME to let us know what
charsets they use. Or rather, we wish we had. Many people use
newsreaders and mailers that do not understand or use MIME, and
just send out messages without saying what character sets they use. To
help a bit with this, some local news hierarchies have policies that say
what character set is the default. For instance, the ‘fj’
hierarchy uses iso-2022-jp
.
This knowledge is encoded in the gnus-group-charset-alist
variable, which is an alist of regexps (use the first item to match full
group names) and default charsets to be used when reading these groups.
In addition, some people do use soi-disant MIME-aware agents that
aren’t. These blithely mark messages as being in iso-8859-1
even if they really are in koi-8
. To help here, the
gnus-newsgroup-ignored-charsets
variable can be used. The
charsets that are listed here will be ignored. The variable can be
set on a group-by-group basis using the group parameters (see section Group Parameters). The default value is (unknown-8bit x-unknown)
,
which includes values some agents insist on having in there.
When posting, gnus-group-posting-charset-alist
is used to
determine which charsets should not be encoded using the MIME
encodings. For instance, some hierarchies discourage using
quoted-printable header encoding.
This variable is an alist of regexps and permitted unencoded charsets
for posting. Each element of the alist has the form (
test
header body-list)
, where:
is either a regular expression matching the newsgroup header or a variable to query,
is the charset which may be left unencoded in the header (nil
means encode all charsets),
is a list of charsets which may be encoded using 8bit content-transfer
encoding in the body, or one of the special values nil
(always
encode using quoted-printable) or t
(always use 8bit).
See (emacs-mime)Encoding Customization section ‘Encoding Customization’ in The Emacs MIME Manual, for additional variables that control which MIME charsets are used when sending messages.
Other charset tricks that may be useful, although not Gnus-specific:
If there are several MIME charsets that encode the same Emacs charset, you can choose what charset to use by saying the following:
(put-charset-property 'cyrillic-iso8859-5 'preferred-coding-system 'koi8-r) |
This means that Russian will be encoded using koi8-r
instead of
the default iso-8859-5
MIME charset.
If you want to read messages in koi8-u
, you can cheat and say
(define-coding-system-alias 'koi8-u 'koi8-r) |
This will almost do the right thing.
And finally, to read charsets like windows-1251
, you can say
something like
(codepage-setup 1251) (define-coding-system-alias 'windows-1251 'cp1251) |
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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. An alternative way to print
article is to use Muttprint (see section Saving Articles).
If <backend>-fetch-partial-articles
is non-nil
, Gnus will
fetch partial articles, if the backend it fetches them from supports
it. Currently only nnimap
does. If you’re looking at a
partial article, and want to see the complete article instead, then
the A C command (gnus-summary-show-complete-article
) will
do so.
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
You can have the summary buffer sorted in various ways, even though I can’t really see why you’d want that.
Sort by article number (gnus-summary-sort-by-number
).
Sort by most recent article number
(gnus-summary-sort-by-most-recent-number
).
Sort by author (gnus-summary-sort-by-author
).
Sort by recipient (gnus-summary-sort-by-recipient
).
Sort by subject (gnus-summary-sort-by-subject
).
Sort by date (gnus-summary-sort-by-date
).
Sort by most recent date (gnus-summary-sort-by-most-recent-date
).
Sort by lines (gnus-summary-sort-by-lines
).
Sort by article length (gnus-summary-sort-by-chars
).
Sort by score (gnus-summary-sort-by-score
).
Randomize (gnus-summary-sort-by-random
).
Sort using the default sorting method
(gnus-summary-sort-by-original
).
These functions will work both when you use threading and when you don’t use threading. In the latter case, all summary lines will be sorted, line by line. In the former case, sorting will be done on a root-by-root basis, which might not be what you were looking for. To toggle whether to use threading, type T T (see section Thread Commands).
If a prefix argument if given, the sort order is reversed.
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
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 great-grandparent of the current article. If you say -3 ^, Gnus will only fetch the great-grandparent of the current article.
Fetch all articles mentioned in the References
header of the
article (gnus-summary-refer-references
).
Display the full thread where the current article appears
(gnus-summary-refer-thread
). This command has to fetch all the
headers in the current group to work, so it usually takes a while. If
you do it often, you may consider setting gnus-fetch-old-headers
to invisible
(see section Filling In Threads). This won’t have any
visible effects normally, but it’ll make this command work a whole lot
faster. Of course, it’ll make group entry somewhat slow.
The gnus-refer-thread-limit
variable says how many old (i.e.,
articles before the first displayed in the current group) headers to
fetch when doing this command. The default is 200. If t
, all
the available headers will be fetched. This variable can be overridden
by giving the A T command a numerical prefix.
You can also ask Gnus 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.
Gnus looks for the Message-ID
in the headers that have already
been fetched, but also tries all the select methods specified by
gnus-refer-article-method
if it is not found.
If the group you are reading is located on a back end that does not
support fetching by Message-ID
very well (like nnspool
),
you can set gnus-refer-article-method
to an NNTP method. It
would, perhaps, be best if the NNTP server you consult is the one
updating the spool you are reading from, but that’s not really
necessary.
It can also be a list of select methods, as well as the special symbol
current
, which means to use the current select method. If it
is a list, Gnus will try all the methods in the list until it finds a
match.
Here’s an example setting that will first try the current method, and then ask Google if that fails:
(setq gnus-refer-article-method '(current (nnweb "google" (nnweb-type google)))) |
Most of the mail back ends support fetching by Message-ID
, but
do not do a particularly excellent job at it. That is, nnmbox
,
nnbabyl
, nnmaildir
, nnml
, are able to locate
articles from any groups, while nnfolder
, and nnimap
are
only able to locate articles that have been posted to the current
group. nnmh
does not support this at all.
Fortunately, the special nnregistry
back end is able to locate
articles in any groups, regardless of their back end (see section fetching by Message-ID
using the registry).
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Different people like to read news using different methods. This being Gnus, we offer a small selection of minor modes for the summary buffers.
3.24.1 Pick and Read | First mark articles and then read them. | |
3.24.2 Binary Groups | Auto-decode all articles. |
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Some newsreaders (like nn
and, uhm, Netnews
on VM/CMS) use
a two-phased reading interface. The user first marks in a summary
buffer the articles she wants to read. Then she starts reading the
articles with just an article buffer displayed.
Gnus provides a summary buffer minor mode that allows
this—gnus-pick-mode
. This basically means that a few process
mark commands become one-keystroke commands to allow easy marking, and
it provides one additional command for switching to the summary buffer.
Here are the available keystrokes when using pick mode:
Pick the article or thread on the current line
(gnus-pick-article-or-thread
). If the variable
gnus-thread-hide-subtree
is true, then this key selects the
entire thread when used at the first article of the thread. Otherwise,
it selects just the article. If given a numerical prefix, go to that
thread or article and pick it. (The line number is normally displayed
at the beginning of the summary pick lines.)
Scroll the summary buffer up one page (gnus-pick-next-page
). If
at the end of the buffer, start reading the picked articles.
Unpick the thread or article
(gnus-pick-unmark-article-or-thread
). If the variable
gnus-thread-hide-subtree
is true, then this key unpicks the
thread if used at the first article of the thread. Otherwise it unpicks
just the article. You can give this key a numerical prefix to unpick
the thread or article at that line.
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.
All the normal summary mode commands are still available in the
pick-mode, with the exception of u. However ! is available
which is mapped to the same function
gnus-summary-tick-article-forward
.
If this sounds like a good idea to you, you could say:
(add-hook 'gnus-summary-mode-hook 'gnus-pick-mode) |
gnus-pick-mode-hook
is run in pick minor mode buffers.
If gnus-mark-unpicked-articles-as-read
is non-nil
, mark
all unpicked articles as read. The default is nil
.
The summary line format in pick mode is slightly different from the
standard format. At the beginning of each line the line number is
displayed. The pick mode line format is controlled by the
gnus-summary-pick-line-format
variable (see section Formatting Variables). It accepts the same format specs that
gnus-summary-line-format
does (see section Summary Buffer Lines).
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
If you spend much time in binary groups, you may grow tired of hitting X u, n, RET all the time. M-x gnus-binary-mode is a minor mode for summary buffers that makes all ordinary Gnus article selection functions uudecode series of articles and display the result instead of just displaying the articles the normal way.
The only way, in fact, to see the actual articles is the g
command, when you have turned on this mode
(gnus-binary-show-article
).
gnus-binary-mode-hook
is called in binary minor mode buffers.
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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 (see section Mode Line Formatting). The default is ‘Gnus: %%b %S %Z’. For a list of valid specs, see section 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.
Valid specs are:
The name of the poster.
The From
header.
The number of the article.
The opening bracket.
The closing bracket.
The subject.
See section 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
. Note that if you
have several windows displayed side-by-side in a frame and the tree
buffer is one of these, minimizing the tree window will also resize all
other windows displayed next to it.
You may also wish to add the following hook to keep the window minimized at all times:
(add-hook 'gnus-configure-windows-hook 'gnus-tree-perhaps-minimize) |
gnus-generate-tree-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 an example from a horizontal tree buffer:
{***}-(***)-[odd]-[Gun] | \[Jan] | \[odd]-[Eri] | \(***)-[Eri] | \[odd]-[Paa] \[Bjo] \[Gun] \[Gun]-[Jor] |
Here’s the same thread displayed in a vertical tree buffer:
{***} |--------------------------\-----\-----\ (***) [Bjo] [Gun] [Gun] |--\-----\-----\ | [odd] [Jan] [odd] (***) [Jor] | | |--\ [Gun] [Eri] [Eri] [odd] | [Paa] |
If you’re using horizontal trees, it might be nice to display the trees side-by-side with the summary buffer. You could add something like the following to your ‘~/.gnus.el’ file:
(setq gnus-use-trees t gnus-generate-tree-function 'gnus-generate-horizontal-tree gnus-tree-minimize-window nil) (gnus-add-configuration '(article (vertical 1.0 (horizontal 0.25 (summary 0.75 point) (tree 1.0)) (article 1.0)))) |
See section Window Layout.
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Some commands only make sense in mail groups. If these commands are invalid in the current group, they will raise a hell and let you know.
All these commands (except the expiry and edit commands) use the process/prefix convention (see section Process/Prefix).
Run all expirable articles in the current group through the expiry
process (gnus-summary-expire-articles
). That is, delete all
expirable articles in the group that have been around for a while.
(see section Expiring Mail).
Delete all the expirable articles in the group
(gnus-summary-expire-articles-now
). This means that all
articles eligible for expiry in the current group will
disappear forever into that big ‘/dev/null’ in the sky.
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
).
Move the article from one mail group to another
(gnus-summary-move-article
). Marks will be preserved if
gnus-preserve-marks
is non-nil
(which is the default).
Copy the article from one group (mail group or not) to a mail group
(gnus-summary-copy-article
). Marks will be preserved if
gnus-preserve-marks
is non-nil
(which is the default).
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.
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.
Create an empty article in the current mail newsgroups
(gnus-summary-create-article
). You will be prompted for a
From
header and a Subject
header.
Respool the mail article (gnus-summary-respool-article
).
gnus-summary-respool-default-method
will be used as the default
select method when respooling. This variable is nil
by default,
which means that the current group select method will be used instead.
Marks will be preserved if gnus-preserve-marks
is non-nil
(which is the default).
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
). If you give a prefix to the
C-c C-c command, Gnus won’t re-highlight the article.
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
).
Similarly, this command will display all fancy splitting patterns used
when respooling, if any (gnus-summary-respool-trace
).
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.
Encrypt the body of an article (gnus-article-encrypt-body
).
The body is encrypted with the encryption protocol specified by the
variable gnus-article-encrypt-protocol
.
If you move (or copy) articles regularly, you might wish to have Gnus
suggest where to put the articles. gnus-move-split-methods
is a
variable that uses the same syntax as gnus-split-methods
(see section Saving Articles). You may customize that variable to create
suggestions you find reasonable. (Note that
gnus-move-split-methods
uses group names where
gnus-split-methods
uses file names.)
(setq gnus-move-split-methods '(("^From:.*Lars Magne" "nnml:junk") ("^Subject:.*gnus" "nnfolder:important") (".*" "nnml:misc"))) |
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
3.27.1 Summary Group Information | Information oriented commands. | |
3.27.2 Searching for Articles | Multiple article commands. | |
3.27.3 Summary Generation Commands | ||
3.27.4 Really Various Summary Commands | Those pesky non-conformant commands. |
gnus-summary-display-while-building
If non-nil
, show and update the summary buffer as it’s being
built. If t
, update the buffer after every line is inserted.
If the value is an integer, n, update the display every n
lines. The default is nil
.
gnus-summary-display-arrow
If non-nil
, display an arrow in the fringe to indicate the
current article.
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 have been set.
gnus-summary-prepare-hook
It 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-prepared-hook
A hook called as the very last thing after the summary buffer has been generated.
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.
gnus-alter-articles-to-read-function
This function, which takes two parameters (the group name and the list of articles to be selected), is called to allow the user to alter the list of articles to be selected.
For instance, the following function adds the list of cached articles to the list in one particular group:
(defun my-add-cached-articles (group articles) (if (string= group "some.group") (append gnus-newsgroup-cached articles) articles)) |
gnus-newsgroup-variables
A list of newsgroup (summary buffer) local variables, or cons of
variables and their default expressions to be evalled (when the default
values are not nil
), that should be made global while the summary
buffer is active.
Note: The default expressions will be evaluated (using function
eval
) before assignment to the local variable rather than just
assigned to it. If the default expression is the symbol global
,
that symbol will not be evaluated but the global value of the local
variable will be used instead.
These variables can be used to set variables in the group parameters while still allowing them to affect operations done in other buffers. For example:
(setq gnus-newsgroup-variables '(message-use-followup-to (gnus-visible-headers . "^From:\\|^Newsgroups:\\|^Subject:\\|^Date:\\|^To:"))) |
Also see section Group Parameters.
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Give a brief description of the current group
(gnus-summary-describe-group
). If given a prefix, force
rereading the description from the server.
Give an extremely brief description of the most important summary
keystrokes (gnus-summary-describe-briefly
).
Go to the Gnus info node (gnus-info-find-node
).
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
Search through all subsequent (raw) articles for a regexp
(gnus-summary-search-article-forward
).
Search through all previous (raw) articles for a regexp
(gnus-summary-search-article-backward
).
Repeat the previous search forwards
(gnus-summary-repeat-search-article-forward
).
Repeat the previous search backwards
(gnus-summary-repeat-search-article-backward
).
This command will prompt you for a header, a regular expression to match
on this field, and a command to be executed if the match is made
(gnus-summary-execute-command
). If the header is an empty
string, the match is done on the entire article. If given a prefix,
search backward instead.
For instance, & RET some.*string RET # will put the process mark on all articles that have heads or bodies that match ‘some.*string’.
Perform any operation on all articles that have been marked with
the process mark (gnus-summary-universal-argument
).
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
Regenerate the current summary buffer (gnus-summary-prepare
).
Pull all cached articles (for the current group) into the summary buffer
(gnus-summary-insert-cached-articles
).
Pull all dormant articles (for the current group) into the summary buffer
(gnus-summary-insert-dormant-articles
).
Pull all ticked articles (for the current group) into the summary buffer
(gnus-summary-insert-ticked-articles
).
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
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 of
some format, you C-d and read these messages in a more convenient
fashion.
The variable gnus-auto-select-on-ephemeral-exit
controls what
article should be selected after exiting a digest group. Valid values
include:
next
Select the next article.
next-unread
Select the next unread article.
next-noselect
Move the cursor to the next article. This is the default.
next-unread-noselect
Move the cursor to the next unread article.
If it has any other value or there is no next (unread) article, the article selected before entering to the digest group will appear.
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 section Process/Prefix).
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.
Edit the group parameters (see section Group Parameters) of the current
group (gnus-summary-edit-parameters
).
Customize the group parameters (see section Group Parameters) of the current
group (gnus-summary-customize-parameters
).
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
Exiting from the summary buffer will normally update all info on the group and return you to the group buffer.
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, which calls
gnus-summary-expire-articles
by default.
gnus-summary-exit-hook
is called after finishing the exit
process. gnus-group-no-more-groups-hook
is run when returning to
group mode having no more (unread) groups.
Exit the current group without updating any information on the group
(gnus-summary-exit-no-update
).
Mark all unticked articles in the group as read and then exit
(gnus-summary-catchup-and-exit
).
Mark all articles, even the ticked ones, as read and then exit
(gnus-summary-catchup-all-and-exit
).
Mark all articles as read and go to the next group
(gnus-summary-catchup-and-goto-next-group
).
Mark all articles as read and go to the previous group
(gnus-summary-catchup-and-goto-prev-group
).
Exit this group, and then enter it again
(gnus-summary-reselect-current-group
). If given a prefix, select
all articles, both read and unread.
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.
Exit the group and go to the next group
(gnus-summary-next-group
).
Exit the group and go to the previous group
(gnus-summary-prev-group
).
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
with an “updating” exit. For instance Q
(gnus-summary-exit-no-update
) does not call this hook.
If you’re in the habit of exiting groups, and then changing your mind
about it, you might set gnus-kill-summary-on-exit
to nil
.
If you do that, Gnus won’t kill the summary buffer when you exit it.
(Quelle surprise!) Instead it will change the name of the buffer to
something like ‘*Dead Summary ... *’ and install a minor mode
called gnus-dead-summary-mode
. Now, if you switch back to this
buffer, you’ll find that all keys are mapped to a function called
gnus-summary-wake-up-the-dead
. So tapping any keys in a dead
summary buffer will result in a live, normal summary buffer.
There will never be more than one dead summary buffer at any one time.
The data on the current group will be updated (which articles you have
read, which articles you have replied to, etc.) when you exit the
summary buffer. If the gnus-use-cross-reference
variable is
t
(which is the default), articles that are cross-referenced to
this group and are marked as read, will also be marked as read in the
other subscribed groups they were cross-posted to. If this variable is
neither nil
nor t
, the article will be marked as read in
both subscribed and unsubscribed groups (see section Crosspost Handling).
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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.
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 section 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 Xref
s right all the time, you have to
set nntp-nov-is-evil
to t
, which slows things down
considerably. Also see section Slow/Expensive Connection.
C’est la vie.
For an alternative approach, see section Duplicate Suppression.
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
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 section Crosspost Handling). However, that simple and efficient approach may not work satisfactory for some users for various reasons.
Xref
header. This
is evil and not very common.
Xref
header in the
‘.overview’ data bases. This is evil and all too common, alas.
I’m sure there are other situations where Xref
handling fails as
well, but these four are the most common situations.
If, and only if, Xref
handling fails for you, then you may
consider switching on duplicate suppression. If you do so, Gnus
will remember the Message-ID
s of all articles you have read or
otherwise marked as read, and then, as if by magic, mark them as read
all subsequent times you see them—in all groups. Using this
mechanism is quite likely to be somewhat inefficient, but not overly
so. It’s certainly preferable to reading the same articles more than
once.
Duplicate suppression is not a very subtle instrument. It’s more like a sledge hammer than anything else. It works in a very simple fashion—if you have marked an article as read, it adds this Message-ID to a cache. The next time it sees this Message-ID, it will mark the article as read with the ‘M’ mark. It doesn’t care what group it saw the article in.
gnus-suppress-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 read in a single Gnus
session are suppressed.
gnus-duplicate-list-length
This variable says how many Message-ID
s 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 in. 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.
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Gnus is able to verify signed messages or decrypt encrypted messages. The formats that are supported are PGP, PGP/MIME and S/MIME, however you need some external programs to get things to work:
The variables that control security functionality on reading/composing messages include:
mm-verify-option
Option of verifying signed parts. never
, not verify;
always
, always verify; known
, only verify known
protocols. Otherwise, ask user.
mm-decrypt-option
Option of decrypting encrypted parts. never
, no decryption;
always
, always decrypt; known
, only decrypt known
protocols. Otherwise, ask user.
mm-sign-option
Option of creating signed parts. nil
, use default signing
keys; guided
, ask user to select signing keys from the menu.
mm-encrypt-option
Option of creating encrypted parts. nil
, use the first
public-key matching the ‘From:’ header as the recipient;
guided
, ask user to select recipient keys from the menu.
mml1991-use
Symbol indicating elisp interface to OpenPGP implementation for
PGP messages. The default is epg
, but pgg
,
and mailcrypt
are also supported although
deprecated. By default, Gnus uses the first available interface in
this order.
mml2015-use
Symbol indicating elisp interface to OpenPGP implementation for
PGP/MIME messages. The default is epg
, but
pgg
, and mailcrypt
are also supported
although deprecated. By default, Gnus uses the first available
interface in this order.
By default the buttons that display security information are not
shown, because they clutter reading the actual e-mail. You can type
K b manually to display the information. Use the
gnus-buttonized-mime-types
and
gnus-unbuttonized-mime-types
variables to control this
permanently. MIME Commands for further details, and hints on
how to customize these variables to always display security
information.
Snarfing OpenPGP keys (i.e., importing keys from articles into your key ring) is not supported explicitly through a menu item or command, rather Gnus do detect and label keys as ‘application/pgp-keys’, allowing you to specify whatever action you think is appropriate through the usual MIME infrastructure. You can use a ‘~/.mailcap’ entry (see (emacs-mime)mailcap section ‘mailcap’ in The Emacs MIME Manual) such as the following to import keys using GNU Privacy Guard when you click on the MIME button (see section Using MIME).
application/pgp-keys; gpg --import --interactive --verbose; needsterminal |
This happens to also be the default action defined in
mailcap-mime-data
.
More information on how to set things for sending outgoing signed and encrypted messages up can be found in the message manual (see (message)Security section ‘Security’ in Message Manual).
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Gnus understands some mailing list fields of RFC 2369. To enable it,
add a to-list
group parameter (see section Group Parameters),
possibly using A M (gnus-mailing-list-insinuate
) in the
summary buffer.
That enables the following commands to the summary buffer:
Send a message to fetch mailing list help, if List-Help field exists.
Send a message to subscribe the mailing list, if List-Subscribe field exists.
Send a message to unsubscribe the mailing list, if List-Unsubscribe field exists.
Post to the mailing list, if List-Post field exists.
Send a message to the mailing list owner, if List-Owner field exists.
Browse the mailing list archive, if List-Archive field exists.
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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.
4.1 Hiding Headers | Deciding what headers should be displayed. | |
4.2 Using MIME | Pushing articles through MIME before reading them. | |
4.3 HTML | Reading HTML messages. | |
4.4 Customizing Articles | Tailoring the look of the articles. | |
4.5 Article Keymap | Keystrokes available in the article buffer. | |
4.6 Misc Article | Other stuff. |
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The top section of each article is the head. (The rest is the body, but you may have guessed that already.)
There is a lot of useful information in the head: the name of the person
who wrote the article, the date it was written and the subject of the
article. That’s well and nice, but there’s also lots of information
most people do not want to see—what systems the article has passed
through before reaching you, the Message-ID
, the
References
, etc. ad nauseam—and you’ll probably want to get rid
of some of those lines. If you want to keep all those lines in the
article buffer, you can set gnus-show-all-headers
to t
.
Gnus provides you with two variables for sifting headers:
gnus-visible-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 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 to be removed.
Note that if gnus-visible-headers
is non-nil
, this
variable will have no effect.
Gnus can also sort the headers for you. (It does this by default.) You
can control the sorting by setting the gnus-sorted-header-list
variable. It is a list of regular expressions that says in what order
the headers are to be displayed.
For instance, if you want the name of the author of the article first, and then the subject, you might say something like:
(setq gnus-sorted-header-list '("^From:" "^Subject:")) |
Any headers that are to remain visible, but are not listed in this variable, will be displayed in random order after all the headers listed in this variable.
You can hide further boring headers by setting
gnus-treat-hide-boring-headers
to head
. What this function
does depends on the gnus-boring-article-headers
variable. It’s a
list, but this list doesn’t actually contain header names. Instead it
lists various boring conditions that Gnus can check and remove
from sight.
These conditions are:
empty
Remove all empty headers.
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 addresses as
the From
header, or if the broken-reply-to
group
parameter is set.
newsgroups
Remove the Newsgroups
header if it only contains the current group
name.
to-address
Remove the To
header if it only contains the address identical to
the current group’s to-address
parameter.
to-list
Remove the To
header if it only contains the address identical to
the current group’s to-list
parameter.
cc-list
Remove the Cc
header if it only contains the address identical to
the current group’s to-list
parameter.
date
Remove the Date
header if the article is less than three days
old.
long-to
Remove the To
and/or Cc
header if it is very long.
many-to
Remove all To
and/or Cc
headers if there are more than one.
To include these three elements, you could say something like:
(setq gnus-boring-article-headers '(empty followup-to reply-to)) |
This is also the default value for this variable.
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Mime is a standard for waving your hands through the air, aimlessly, while people stand around yawning.
MIME, however, is a standard for encoding your articles, aimlessly, while all newsreaders die of fear.
MIME may specify what character set the article uses, the encoding of the characters, and it also makes it possible to embed pictures and other naughty stuff in innocent-looking articles.
Gnus pushes MIME articles through gnus-display-mime-function
to display the MIME parts. This is gnus-display-mime
by
default, which creates a bundle of clickable buttons that can be used to
display, save and manipulate the MIME objects.
The following commands are available when you have placed point over a MIME button:
Toggle displaying of the MIME object
(gnus-article-press-button
). If built-in viewers can not display
the object, Gnus resorts to external viewers in the ‘mailcap’
files. If a viewer has the ‘copiousoutput’ specification, the
object is displayed inline.
Prompt for a method, and then view the MIME object using this
method (gnus-mime-view-part
).
View the MIME object as if it were a different MIME media type
(gnus-mime-view-part-as-type
).
Prompt for a charset, and then view the MIME object using this
charset (gnus-mime-view-part-as-charset
).
Prompt for a file name, and then save the MIME object
(gnus-mime-save-part
).
Prompt for a file name, then save the MIME object and strip it from
the article. Then proceed to article editing, where a reasonable
suggestion is being made on how the altered article should look
like. The stripped MIME object will be referred via the
message/external-body MIME type.
(gnus-mime-save-part-and-strip
).
Prompt for a file name, replace the MIME object with an
external body referring to the file via the message/external-body
MIME type. (gnus-mime-replace-part
).
Delete the MIME object from the article and replace it with some
information about the removed MIME object
(gnus-mime-delete-part
).
Copy the MIME object to a fresh buffer and display this buffer
(gnus-mime-copy-part
). If given a prefix, copy the raw contents
without decoding. If given a numerical prefix, you can do semi-manual
charset stuff (see gnus-summary-show-article-charset-alist
in
Scrolling the Article). Compressed files like ‘.gz’ and
‘.bz2’ are automatically decompressed if
auto-compression-mode
is enabled (see (emacs)Compressed Files section ‘Accessing Compressed Files’ in The Emacs Editor).
Print the MIME object (gnus-mime-print-part
). This
command respects the ‘print=’ specifications in the
‘.mailcap’ file.
Insert the contents of the MIME object into the buffer
(gnus-mime-inline-part
) as ‘text/plain’. If given a prefix, insert
the raw contents without decoding. If given a numerical prefix, you can
do semi-manual charset stuff (see
gnus-summary-show-article-charset-alist
in Scrolling the Article). Compressed files like ‘.gz’ and ‘.bz2’ are
automatically decompressed depending on jka-compr
regardless of
auto-compression-mode
(see (emacs)Compressed Files section ‘Accessing Compressed Files’ in The Emacs Editor).
View the MIME object with an internal viewer. If no internal
viewer is available, use an external viewer
(gnus-mime-view-part-internally
).
View the MIME object with an external viewer.
(gnus-mime-view-part-externally
).
Output the MIME object to a process (gnus-mime-pipe-part
).
Interactively run an action on the MIME object
(gnus-mime-action-on-part
).
Gnus will display some MIME objects automatically. The way Gnus determines which parts to do this with is described in the Emacs MIME manual.
It might be best to just use the toggling functions from the article buffer to avoid getting nasty surprises. (For instance, you enter the group ‘alt.sing-a-long’ and, before you know it, MIME has decoded the sound file in the article and some horrible sing-a-long song comes screaming out your speakers, and you can’t find the volume button, because there isn’t one, and people are starting to look at you, and you try to stop the program, but you can’t, and you can’t find the program to control the volume, and everybody else in the room suddenly decides to look at you disdainfully, and you’ll feel rather stupid.)
Any similarity to real events and people is purely coincidental. Ahem.
Also see section MIME Commands.
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Gnus can display HTML articles nicely formatted in the article buffer. There are many methods for doing that, but two of them are kind of default methods.
If your Emacs copy has been built with libxml2 support, then Gnus uses
Emacs’ built-in, plain elisp Simple HTML Renderer shr
(2) which is also used by Emacs’
browser EWW (see (emacs)EWW section ‘EWW’ in The Emacs Manual).
If your Emacs copy lacks libxml2 support but you have w3m
installed on your system, Gnus uses that to render HTML mail
and display the results in the article buffer (gnus-w3m
).
For a complete overview, consult See (emacs-mime)Display Customization section ‘Display Customization’ in The Emacs MIME Manual. This section only describes the default method.
mm-text-html-renderer
If set to shr
, Gnus uses its own simple HTML
renderer. If set to gnus-w3m
, it uses w3m
.
gnus-blocked-images
External images that have URLs that match this regexp won’t be fetched and displayed. For instance, do block all URLs that have the string “ads” in them, do the following:
(setq gnus-blocked-images "ads") |
This can also be a function to be evaluated. If so, it will be
called with the group name as the parameter. The default value is
gnus-block-private-groups
, which will return ‘"."’ for
anything that isn’t a newsgroup. This means that no external images
will be fetched as a result of reading mail, so that nobody can use
web bugs (and the like) to track whether you’ve read email.
Also see section Misc Article for gnus-inhibit-images
.
-cache-directory
Gnus will download and cache images according to how
gnus-blocked-images
is set. These images will be stored in
this directory.
-cache-size
When -cache-size
bytes have been used in that
directory, the oldest files will be deleted. The default is 500MB.
-frame-width
The width to use when rendering HTML. The default is 70.
gnus-max-image-proportion
How big pictures displayed are in relation to the window they’re in. A value of 0.7 (the default) means that they are allowed to take up 70% of the width and height of the window. If they are larger than this, and Emacs supports it, then the images will be rescaled down to fit these criteria.
To use this, make sure that you have w3m
and curl
installed. If you have, then Gnus should display HTML
automatically.
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A slew of functions for customizing how the articles are to look like exist. You can call these functions interactively (see section Article Washing), or you can have them called automatically when you select the articles.
To have them called automatically, you should set the corresponding
“treatment” variable. For instance, to have headers hidden, you’d set
gnus-treat-hide-headers
. Below is a list of variables that can
be set, but first we discuss the values these variables can have.
Note: Some values, while valid, make little sense. Check the list below for sensible values.
nil
: Don’t do this treatment.
t
: Do this treatment on all body parts.
head
: Do the treatment on the headers.
first
: Do this treatment on the first body part.
last
: Do this treatment on the last body part.
The list is evaluated recursively. The first element of the list is a
predicate. The following predicates are recognized: or
,
and
, not
and typep
. Here’s an example:
(or last (typep "text/x-vcard")) |
nil
or non-nil
. The current article is available in the
buffer named by gnus-article-buffer
.
You may have noticed that the word part is used here. This refers to the fact that some messages are MIME multipart articles that may be divided into several parts. Articles that are not multiparts are considered to contain just a single part.
Are the treatments applied to all sorts of multipart parts? Yes, if you
want to, but by default, only ‘text/plain’ parts are given the
treatment. This is controlled by the gnus-article-treat-types
variable, which is a list of regular expressions that are matched to the
type of the part. This variable is ignored if the value of the
controlling variable is a predicate list, as described above.
The following treatment options are available. The easiest way to
customize this is to examine the gnus-article-treat
customization
group. Values in parenthesis are suggested sensible values. Others are
possible but those listed are probably sufficient for most people.
gnus-treat-buttonize (t, integer)
gnus-treat-buttonize-head (head)
See section Article Buttons.
gnus-treat-capitalize-sentences (t, integer)
gnus-treat-overstrike (t, integer)
gnus-treat-strip-cr (t, integer)
gnus-treat-strip-headers-in-body (t, integer)
gnus-treat-strip-leading-blank-lines (t, first, integer)
gnus-treat-strip-multiple-blank-lines (t, integer)
gnus-treat-strip-pem (t, last, integer)
gnus-treat-strip-trailing-blank-lines (t, last, integer)
gnus-treat-unsplit-urls (t, integer)
gnus-treat-wash-html (t, integer)
See section Article Washing.
gnus-treat-date (head)
This will transform/add date headers according to the
gnus-article-date-headers
variable. This is a list of Date
headers to display. The formats available are:
ut
Universal time, aka GMT, aka ZULU.
local
The user’s local time zone.
english
A semi-readable English sentence.
lapsed
The time elapsed since the message was posted.
combined-lapsed
Both the original date header and a (shortened) elapsed time.
original
The original date header.
iso8601
ISO8601 format, i.e., “2010-11-23T22:05:21”.
user-defined
A format done according to the gnus-article-time-format
variable.
See section Article Date.
gnus-treat-from-picon (head)
gnus-treat-mail-picon (head)
gnus-treat-newsgroups-picon (head)
See section Picons.
gnus-treat-from-gravatar (head)
gnus-treat-mail-gravatar (head)
See section Gravatars.
gnus-treat-display-smileys (t, integer)
gnus-treat-body-boundary (head)
Adds a delimiter between header and body, the string used as delimiter
is controlled by gnus-body-boundary-delimiter
.
See section Smileys.
gnus-treat-display-x-face (head)
See section X-Face.
gnus-treat-display-face (head)
See section Face.
gnus-treat-emphasize (t, head, integer)
gnus-treat-fill-article (t, integer)
gnus-treat-fill-long-lines (t, integer)
gnus-treat-hide-boring-headers (head)
gnus-treat-hide-citation (t, integer)
gnus-treat-hide-citation-maybe (t, integer)
gnus-treat-hide-headers (head)
gnus-treat-hide-signature (t, last)
gnus-treat-strip-banner (t, last)
gnus-treat-strip-list-identifiers (head)
See section Article Hiding.
gnus-treat-highlight-citation (t, integer)
gnus-treat-highlight-headers (head)
gnus-treat-highlight-signature (t, last, integer)
See section Article Highlighting.
gnus-treat-play-sounds
gnus-treat-ansi-sequences (t)
gnus-treat-x-pgp-sig (head)
gnus-treat-unfold-headers (head)
gnus-treat-fold-headers (head)
gnus-treat-fold-newsgroups (head)
gnus-treat-leading-whitespace (head)
See section Article Header.
You can, of course, write your own functions to be called from
gnus-part-display-hook
. The functions are called narrowed to the
part, and you can do anything you like, pretty much. There is no
information that you have to keep in the buffer—you can change
everything.
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Most of the keystrokes in the summary buffer can also be used in the article buffer. They should behave as if you typed them in the summary buffer, which means that you don’t actually have to have a summary buffer displayed while reading. You can do it all from the article buffer.
The key v is reserved for users. You can bind it to some command or better use it as a prefix key.
A few additional keystrokes are available:
Scroll forwards one page (gnus-article-next-page
).
This is exactly the same as h SPACE h.
Scroll backwards one page (gnus-article-prev-page
).
This is exactly the same as h DEL h.
If point is in the neighborhood of a Message-ID
and you press
C-c ^, Gnus will try to get that article from the server
(gnus-article-refer-article
).
Send a reply to the address near point (gnus-article-mail
). If
given a prefix, include the mail.
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
).
Go to the next button, if any (gnus-article-next-button
). This
only makes sense if you have buttonizing turned on.
Go to the previous button, if any (gnus-article-prev-button
).
Send a reply to the current article and yank the current article
(gnus-article-reply-with-original
). If the region is active,
only yank the text in the region.
Send a wide reply to the current article and yank the current article
(gnus-article-wide-reply-with-original
). If the region is
active, only yank the text in the region.
Send a followup to the current article and yank the current article
(gnus-article-followup-with-original
). If the region is active,
only yank the text in the region.
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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-widen-article-window
If non-nil
, selecting the article buffer with the h
command will “widen” the article window to take the entire frame.
gnus-article-decode-hook
Hook used to decode MIME articles. The default value is
(article-decode-charset article-decode-encoded-words)
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-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-over-scroll
If non-nil
, allow scrolling the article buffer even when there
no more new text to scroll in. The default is nil
.
gnus-article-mode-line-format
This variable is a format string along the same lines as
gnus-summary-mode-line-format
(see section Summary Buffer Mode Line). It accepts the same format specifications as that variable,
with two extensions:
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. The characters and their meaning:
Displayed when cited text may be hidden in the article buffer.
Displayed when headers are hidden in the article buffer.
Displayed when article is digitally signed or encrypted, and Gnus has hidden the security headers. (N.B. does not tell anything about security status, i.e., good or bad signature.)
Displayed when the signature has been hidden in the Article buffer.
Displayed when Gnus has treated overstrike characters in the article buffer.
Displayed when Gnus has treated emphasized strings in the article buffer.
The number of MIME parts in the article.
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’ (formfeed).
gnus-use-idna
This variable controls whether Gnus performs IDNA decoding of internationalized domain names inside ‘From’, ‘To’ and ‘Cc’ headers. See (message)IDNA section ‘IDNA’ in The Message Manual, for how to compose such messages. This requires GNU Libidn, and this variable is only enabled if you have installed it.
gnus-inhibit-images
If this is non-nil
, inhibit displaying of images inline in the
article body. It is effective to images that are in articles as
MIME parts, and images in HTML articles rendered
when mm-text-html-renderer
(see (emacs-mime)Display Customization section ‘Display Customization’ in The Emacs MIME Manual) is
shr
or gnus-w3m
.
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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 (message)Top section ‘Overview’ in Message Manual. Where the message will be posted/mailed to depends on your setup (see section Posting Server).
5.1 Mail | Mailing and replying. | |
5.2 Posting Server | What server should you post and mail via? | |
5.3 POP before SMTP | You cannot send a mail unless you read a mail. | |
5.4 Mail and Post | Mailing and posting at the same time. | |
5.5 Archived Messages | Where Gnus stores the messages you’ve sent. | |
5.6 Posting Styles | An easier way to specify who you are. | |
5.7 Drafts | Postponing messages and rejected messages. | |
5.8 Rejected Articles | What happens if the server doesn’t like your article? | |
5.9 Signing and encrypting | How to compose secure messages. |
Also see section Canceling Articles for information on how to remove articles you shouldn’t have posted.
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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. If
nil
include all headers.
gnus-add-to-list
If non-nil
, add a to-list
group parameter to mail groups
that have none when you do a a.
gnus-confirm-mail-reply-to-news
If non-nil
, Gnus will ask you for a confirmation when you are
about to reply to news articles by mail. If it is nil
, nothing
interferes in what you want to do. This can also be a function
receiving the group name as the only parameter which should return
non-nil
if a confirmation is needed, or a regular expression
matching group names, where confirmation should be asked for.
If you find yourself never wanting to reply to mail, but occasionally press R anyway, this variable might be for you.
gnus-confirm-treat-mail-like-news
If non-nil
, Gnus also requests confirmation according to
gnus-confirm-mail-reply-to-news
when replying to mail. This is
useful for treating mailing lists like newsgroups.
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When you press those magical C-c C-c keys to ship off your latest (extremely intelligent, of course) article, where does it go?
Thank you for asking. I hate you.
It can be quite complicated.
When posting news, Message usually invokes message-send-news
(see (message)News Variables section ‘News Variables’ in Message Manual).
Normally, Gnus will post using the same select method as you’re
reading from (which might be convenient if you’re reading lots of
groups from different private servers). However. If the server
you’re reading from doesn’t allow posting, just reading, you probably
want to use some other server to post your (extremely intelligent and
fabulously interesting) articles. You can then set the
gnus-post-method
to some other method:
(setq gnus-post-method '(nnspool "")) |
Now, if you’ve done this, and then this server rejects your article, or this server is down, what do you do then? To override this variable you can use a non-zero prefix to the C-c C-c command to force using the “current” server, to get back the default behavior, for posting.
If you give a zero prefix (i.e., C-u 0 C-c C-c) to that command, Gnus will prompt you for what method to use for posting.
You can also set gnus-post-method
to a list of select methods.
If that’s the case, Gnus will always prompt you for what method to use
for posting.
Finally, if you want to always post using the native select method,
you can set this variable to native
.
When sending mail, Message invokes the function specified by the
variable message-send-mail-function
. Gnus tries to set it to a
value suitable for your system.
See (message)Mail Variables section ‘Mail Variables’ in Message manual, for more
information.
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Does your ISP use POP-before-SMTP authentication? This authentication method simply requires you to contact the POP server before sending email. To do that, put the following lines in your ‘~/.gnus.el’ file:
(add-hook 'message-send-mail-hook 'mail-source-touch-pop) |
The mail-source-touch-pop
function does POP
authentication according to the value of mail-sources
without
fetching mails, just before sending a mail. See section Mail Sources.
If you have two or more POP mail servers set in
mail-sources
, you may want to specify one of them to
mail-source-primary-source
as the POP mail server to be
used for the POP-before-SMTP authentication. If it
is your primary POP mail server (i.e., you are fetching mails
mainly from that server), you can set it permanently as follows:
(setq mail-source-primary-source '(pop :server "pop3.mail.server" :password "secret")) |
Otherwise, bind it dynamically only when performing the POP-before-SMTP authentication as follows:
(add-hook 'message-send-mail-hook (lambda () (let ((mail-source-primary-source '(pop :server "pop3.mail.server" :password "secret"))) (mail-source-touch-pop)))) |
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Here’s a list of variables relevant to both mailing and posting:
gnus-mailing-list-groups
If your news server offers groups that are really mailing lists
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 section Group Parameters). An easier thing to do is set the
gnus-mailing-list-groups
to a regexp that matches the groups that
really are mailing lists. Then, at least, followups to the mailing
lists will work most of the time. Posting to these groups (a) is
still a pain, though.
gnus-user-agent
This variable controls which information should be exposed in the
User-Agent header. It can be a list of symbols or a string. Valid
symbols are gnus
(show Gnus version) and emacs
(show Emacs
version). In addition to the Emacs version, you can add codename
(show (S)XEmacs codename) or either config
(show system
configuration) or type
(show system type). If you set it to a
string, be sure to use a valid format, see RFC 2616.
You may want to do spell-checking on messages that you send out. Or, if
you don’t want to spell-check by hand, you could add automatic
spell-checking via the ispell
package:
(add-hook 'message-send-hook 'ispell-message) |
If you want to change the ispell
dictionary based on what group
you’re in, you could say something like the following:
(add-hook 'gnus-select-group-hook (lambda () (cond ((string-match "^de\\." (gnus-group-real-name gnus-newsgroup-name)) (ispell-change-dictionary "deutsch")) (t (ispell-change-dictionary "english"))))) |
Modify to suit your needs.
If gnus-message-highlight-citation
is t
, different levels of
citations are highlighted like in Gnus article buffers also in message
mode buffers.
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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
. The
default is "sent.%Y-%m", which gives you one archive group per month.
For archiving interesting messages in a group you read, see the
B c (gnus-summary-copy-article
) command (see section Mail Group Commands).
gnus-message-archive-method
says what virtual server Gnus is to
use to store sent messages. The default is "archive"
, and when
actually being used it is expanded into:
(nnfolder "archive" (nnfolder-directory "~/Mail/archive") (nnfolder-active-file "~/Mail/archive/active") (nnfolder-get-new-mail nil) (nnfolder-inhibit-expiry t)) |
Note: a server like this is saved in the ‘~/.newsrc.eld’ file first so that it may be used as a real method of the server which is named
"archive"
(that is, for the case wheregnus-message-archive-method
is set to"archive"
) ever since. If it once has been saved, it will never be updated by default even if you change the value ofgnus-message-archive-method
afterward. Therefore, the server"archive"
doesn’t necessarily mean thennfolder
server like this at all times. If you want the saved method to reflect always the value ofgnus-message-archive-method
, set thegnus-update-message-archive-method
variable to a non-nil
value. The default value of this variable isnil
.
You can, however, use any mail select method (nnml
,
nnmbox
, etc.). nnfolder
is a quite likable select method
for doing this sort of thing, though. If you don’t like the default
directory chosen, you could say something like:
(setq gnus-message-archive-method '(nnfolder "archive" (nnfolder-inhibit-expiry t) (nnfolder-active-file "~/News/sent-mail/active") (nnfolder-directory "~/News/sent-mail/"))) |
Gnus will insert Gcc
headers in all outgoing messages that point
to one or more group(s) on that server. Which group to use is
determined by the gnus-message-archive-group
variable.
This variable can be used to do the following:
Messages will be saved in that group.
Note that you can include a select method in the group name, then the
message will not be stored in the select method given by
gnus-message-archive-method
, but in the select method specified
by the group name, instead. Suppose gnus-message-archive-method
has the default value shown above. Then setting
gnus-message-archive-group
to "foo"
means that outgoing
messages are stored in ‘nnfolder+archive:foo’, but if you use the
value "nnml:foo"
, then outgoing messages will be stored in
‘nnml:foo’.
Messages will be saved in all those groups.
When a key “matches”, the result is used.
nil
No message archiving will take place.
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"))))) |
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.
gnus-gcc-mark-as-read
If non-nil
, automatically mark Gcc
articles as read.
gnus-gcc-externalize-attachments
If nil
, attach files as normal parts in Gcc copies; if a regexp
and matches the Gcc group name, attach files as external parts; if it is
all
, attach local files as external parts; if it is other
non-nil
, the behavior is the same as all
, but it may be
changed in the future.
gnus-gcc-self-resent-messages
Like the gcc-self
group parameter, applied only for unmodified
messages that gnus-summary-resend-message
(see section Summary Mail Commands) resends. Non-nil
value of this variable takes
precedence over any existing Gcc
header.
If this is none
, no Gcc
copy will be made. If this is
t
, messages resent will be Gcc
copied to the current
group. If this is a string, it specifies a group to which resent
messages will be Gcc
copied. If this is nil
, Gcc
will be done according to existing Gcc
header(s), if any. If
this is no-gcc-self
, that is the default, resent messages will be
Gcc
copied to groups that existing Gcc
header specifies,
except for the current group.
gnus-gcc-pre-body-encode-hook
gnus-gcc-post-body-encode-hook
These hooks are run before/after encoding the message body of the Gcc copy of a sent message. The current buffer (when the hook is run) contains the message including the message header. Changes made to the message will only affect the Gcc copy, but not the original message. You can use these hooks to edit the copy (and influence subsequent transformations), e.g., remove MML secure tags (see section Signing and encrypting).
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All them variables, they make my head swim.
So what if you want a different Organization
and signature based
on what groups you post to? And you post both from your home machine
and your work machine, and you want different From
lines, and so
on?
One way to do stuff like that is to write clever hooks that change the
variables you need to have changed. That’s a bit boring, so somebody
came up with the bright idea of letting the user specify these things in
a handy alist. Here’s an example of a gnus-posting-styles
variable:
((".*" (signature "Peace and happiness") (organization "What me?")) ("^comp" (signature "Death to everybody")) ("comp.emacs.i-love-it" (organization "Emacs is it"))) |
As you might surmise from this example, this alist consists of several
styles. Each style will be applicable if the first element
“matches”, in some form or other. The entire alist will be iterated
over, from the beginning towards the end, and each match will be
applied, which means that attributes in later styles that match override
the same attributes in earlier matching styles. So
‘comp.programming.literate’ will have the ‘Death to everybody’
signature and the ‘What me?’ Organization
header.
The first element in each style is called the match
. If it’s a
string, then Gnus will try to regexp match it against the group name.
If it is the form (header match regexp)
, then Gnus
will look in the original article for a header whose name is
match and compare that regexp. match and
regexp are strings. (The original article is the one you are
replying or following up to. If you are not composing a reply or a
followup, then there is nothing to match against.) If the
match
is a function symbol, that function will be called with
no arguments. If it’s a variable symbol, then the variable will be
referenced. If it’s a list, then that list will be eval
ed. In
any case, if this returns a non-nil
value, then the style is
said to match.
Each style may contain an arbitrary amount of attributes. Each
attribute consists of a (name value)
pair. In
addition, you can also use the (name :file value)
form or the (name :value value)
form. Where
:file
signifies value represents a file name and its
contents should be used as the attribute value, :value
signifies
value does not represent a file name explicitly. The attribute
name can be one of:
signature
signature-file
x-face-file
address
, overriding user-mail-address
name
, overriding (user-full-name)
body
Note that the signature-file
attribute honors the variable
message-signature-directory
.
The attribute name can also be a string or a symbol. In that case,
this will be used as a header name, and the value will be inserted in
the headers of the article; if the value is nil
, the header
name will be removed. If the attribute name is eval
, the form
is evaluated, and the result is thrown away.
The attribute value can be a string, a function with zero arguments
(the return value will be used), a variable (its value will be used)
or a list (it will be eval
ed and the return value will be
used). The functions and sexps are called/eval
ed in the
message buffer that is being set up. The headers of the current
article are available through the message-reply-headers
variable, which is a vector of the following headers: number subject
from date id references chars lines xref extra.
In the case of a string value, if the match
is a regular
expression, or if it takes the form (header match
regexp)
, a ‘gnus-match-substitute-replacement’ is proceed
on the value to replace the positional parameters ‘\n’ by
the corresponding parenthetical matches (see See (elisp)Replacing Match section ‘Replacing the Text that Matched’ in The Emacs Lisp Reference Manual.)
If you wish to check whether the message you are about to compose is
meant to be a news article or a mail message, you can check the values
of the message-news-p
and message-mail-p
functions.
So here’s a new example:
(setq gnus-posting-styles '((".*" (signature-file "~/.signature") (name "User Name") (x-face-file "~/.xface") (x-url (getenv "WWW_HOME")) (organization "People's Front Against MWM")) ("^rec.humor" (signature my-funny-signature-randomizer)) ((equal (system-name) "gnarly") ;; A form (signature my-quote-randomizer)) (message-news-p ;; A function symbol (signature my-news-signature)) (window-system ;; A value symbol ("X-Window-System" (format "%s" window-system))) ;; If I'm replying to Larsi, set the Organization header. ((header "from" "larsi.*org") (Organization "Somewhere, Inc.")) ;; Reply to a message from the same subaddress the message ;; was sent to. ((header "x-original-to" "me\\(\\+.+\\)@example.org") (address "me\\1@example.org")) ((posting-from-work-p) ;; A user defined function (signature-file "~/.work-signature") (address "user@bar.foo") (body "You are fired.\n\nSincerely, your boss.") ("X-Message-SMTP-Method" "smtp smtp.example.org 587") (organization "Important Work, Inc")) ("nnml:.*" (From (with-current-buffer gnus-article-buffer (message-fetch-field "to")))) ("^nn.+:" (signature-file "~/.mail-signature")))) |
The ‘nnml:.*’ rule means that you use the To
address as the
From
address in all your outgoing replies, which might be handy
if you fill many roles.
You may also use message-alternative-emails
instead.
See (message)Message Headers section ‘Message Headers’ in Message Manual.
Of particular interest in the “work-mail” style is the ‘X-Message-SMTP-Method’ header. It specifies how to send the outgoing email. You may want to sent certain emails through certain SMTP servers due to company policies, for instance. See (message)Mail Variables section ‘Message Variables’ in Message Manual.
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If you are writing a message (mail or news) and suddenly remember that you have a steak in the oven (or some pesto in the food processor, you craaazy vegetarians), you’ll probably wish there was a method to save the message you are writing so that you can continue editing it some other day, and send it when you feel its finished.
Well, don’t worry about it. Whenever you start composing a message of some sort using the Gnus mail and post commands, the buffer you get will automatically associate to an article in a special draft group. If you save the buffer the normal way (C-x C-s, for instance), the article will be saved there. (Auto-save files also go to the draft group.)
The draft group is a special group (which is implemented as an
nndraft
group, if you absolutely have to know) called
‘nndraft:drafts’. The variable nndraft-directory
says where
nndraft
is to store its files. What makes this group special is
that you can’t tick any articles in it or mark any articles as
read—all articles in the group are permanently unread.
If the group doesn’t exist, it will be created and you’ll be subscribed to it. The only way to make it disappear from the Group buffer is to unsubscribe it. The special properties of the draft group comes from a group property (see section Group Parameters), and if lost the group behaves like any other group. This means the commands below will not be available. To restore the special properties of the group, the simplest way is to kill the group, using C-k, and restart Gnus. The group is automatically created again with the correct parameters. The content of the group is not lost.
When you want to continue editing the article, you simply enter the
draft group and push D e (gnus-draft-edit-message
) to do
that. You will be placed in a buffer where you left off.
Rejected articles will also be put in this draft group (see section Rejected Articles).
If you have lots of rejected messages you want to post (or mail) without
doing further editing, you can use the D s command
(gnus-draft-send-message
). This command understands the
process/prefix convention (see section Process/Prefix). The D S
command (gnus-draft-send-all-messages
) will ship off all messages
in the buffer.
If you have some messages that you wish not to send, you can use the
D t (gnus-draft-toggle-sending
) command to mark the message
as unsendable. This is a toggling command.
Finally, if you want to delete a draft, use the normal B DEL command (see section Mail Group Commands).
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Sometimes a news server will reject an article. Perhaps the server doesn’t like your face. Perhaps it just feels miserable. Perhaps there be demons. Perhaps you have included too much cited text. Perhaps the disk is full. Perhaps the server is down.
These situations are, of course, totally beyond the control of Gnus. (Gnus, of course, loves the way you look, always feels great, has angels fluttering around inside of it, doesn’t care about how much cited text you include, never runs full and never goes down.) So Gnus saves these articles until some later time when the server feels better.
The rejected articles will automatically be put in a special draft group (see section Drafts). When the server comes back up again, you’d then typically enter that group and send all the articles off.
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Gnus can digitally sign and encrypt your messages, using vanilla
PGP format or PGP/MIME or S/MIME. For
decoding such messages, see the mm-verify-option
and
mm-decrypt-option
options (see section Security).
Often, you would like to sign replies to people who send you signed
messages. Even more often, you might want to encrypt messages which
are in reply to encrypted messages. Gnus offers
gnus-message-replysign
to enable the former, and
gnus-message-replyencrypt
for the latter. In addition, setting
gnus-message-replysignencrypted
(on by default) will sign
automatically encrypted messages.
Instructing MML to perform security operations on a MIME part is done using the C-c C-m s key map for signing and the C-c C-m c key map for encryption, as follows.
Digitally sign current message using S/MIME.
Digitally sign current message using PGP.
Digitally sign current message using PGP/MIME.
Digitally encrypt current message using S/MIME.
Digitally encrypt current message using PGP.
Digitally encrypt current message using PGP/MIME.
Remove security related MML tags from message.
See (message)Security section ‘Security’ in Message Manual, for more information.
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A foreign group is a group not read by the usual (or default) means. It could be, for instance, a group from a different NNTP server, it could be a virtual group, or it could be your own personal mail group.
A foreign group (or any group, really) is specified by a name and
a select method. To take the latter first, a select method is a
list where the first element says what back end to use (e.g., nntp
,
nnspool
, nnml
) and the second element is the server
name. There may be additional elements in the select method, where the
value may have special meaning for the back end in question.
One could say that a select method defines a virtual server—so we do just that (see section Server Buffer).
The name of the group is the name the back end will recognize the group as.
For instance, the group ‘soc.motss’ on the NNTP server
‘some.where.edu’ will have the name ‘soc.motss’ and select
method (nntp "some.where.edu")
. Gnus will call this group
‘nntp+some.where.edu:soc.motss’, even though the nntp
back end just knows this group as ‘soc.motss’.
The different methods all have their peculiarities, of course.
6.1 Server Buffer | Making and editing virtual servers. | |
6.2 Getting News | Reading USENET news with Gnus. | |
6.3 Using IMAP | Reading mail from IMAP. | |
6.4 Getting Mail | Reading your personal mail with Gnus. | |
6.5 Browsing the Web | Getting messages from a plethora of Web sources. | |
6.6 Other Sources | Reading directories, files. | |
6.7 Combined Groups | Combining groups into one group. | |
6.8 Email Based Diary | Using mails to manage diary events in Gnus. | |
6.9 Gnus Unplugged | Reading news and mail offline. |
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Traditionally, a server is a machine or a piece of software that one connects to, and then requests information from. Gnus does not connect directly to any real servers, but does all transactions through one back end or other. But that’s just putting one layer more between the actual media and Gnus, so we might just as well say that each back end represents a virtual server.
For instance, the nntp
back end may be used to connect to several
different actual NNTP servers, or, perhaps, to many different ports
on the same actual NNTP server. You tell Gnus which back end to
use, and what parameters to set by specifying a select method.
These select method specifications can sometimes become quite complicated—say, for instance, that you want to read from the NNTP server ‘news.funet.fi’ on port number 13, which hangs if queried for NOV headers and has a buggy select. Ahem. Anyway, if you had to specify that for each group that used this server, that would be too much work, so Gnus offers a way of naming select methods, which is what you do in the server buffer.
To enter the server buffer, use the ^
(gnus-group-enter-server-mode
) command in the group buffer.
6.1.1 Server Buffer Format | You can customize the look of this buffer. | |
6.1.2 Server Commands | Commands to manipulate servers. | |
6.1.3 Example Methods | Examples server specifications. | |
6.1.4 Creating a Virtual Server | An example session. | |
6.1.5 Server Variables | Which variables to set. | |
6.1.6 Servers and Methods | You can use server names as select methods. | |
6.1.7 Unavailable Servers | Some servers you try to contact may be down. |
gnus-server-mode-hook
is run when creating the server buffer.
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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:
How the news is fetched—the back end name.
The name of this server.
Where the news is to be fetched from—the address.
The opened/closed/denied status of the server.
Whether this server is agentized.
The mode line can also be customized by using the
gnus-server-mode-line-format
variable (see section Mode Line Formatting). The following specs are understood:
Server name.
Server method.
Also see section Formatting Variables.
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The key v is reserved for users. You can bind it to some command or better use it as a prefix key.
Add a new server (gnus-server-add-server
).
Edit a server (gnus-server-edit-server
).
Show the definition of a server (gnus-server-show-server
).
Browse the current server (gnus-server-read-server
).
Return to the group buffer (gnus-server-exit
).
Kill the current server (gnus-server-kill-server
).
Yank the previously killed server (gnus-server-yank-server
).
Copy the current server (gnus-server-copy-server
).
List all servers (gnus-server-list-servers
).
Request that the server scan its sources for new articles
(gnus-server-scan-server
). This is mainly sensible with mail
servers.
Request that the server regenerate all its data structures
(gnus-server-regenerate-server
). This can be useful if you have
a mail back end that has gotten out of sync.
Compact all groups in the server under point
(gnus-server-compact-server
). Currently implemented only in
nnml (see section Mail Spool). This removes gaps between article numbers,
hence getting a correct total article count.
Some more commands for closing, disabling, and re-opening servers are listed in Unavailable Servers.
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Most select methods are pretty simple and self-explanatory:
(nntp "news.funet.fi") |
Reading directly from the spool is even simpler:
(nnspool "") |
As you can see, the first element in a select method is the name of the back end, and the second is the address, or name, if you will.
After these two elements, there may be an arbitrary number of
(variable form)
pairs.
To go back to the first example—imagine that you want to read from port 15 on that machine. This is what the select method should look like then:
(nntp "news.funet.fi" (nntp-port-number 15)) |
You should read the documentation to each back end to find out what
variables are relevant, but here’s an nnmh
example:
nnmh
is a mail back end that reads a spool-like structure. Say
you have two structures that you wish to access: One is your private
mail spool, and the other is a public one. Here’s the possible spec for
your private mail:
(nnmh "private" (nnmh-directory "~/private/mail/")) |
(This server is then called ‘private’, but you may have guessed that.)
Here’s the method for a public spool:
(nnmh "public" (nnmh-directory "/usr/information/spool/") (nnmh-get-new-mail nil)) |
If you are behind a firewall and only have access to the NNTP
server from the firewall machine, you can instruct Gnus to rlogin
on the firewall machine and connect with
netcat from there to the
NNTP server.
Doing this can be rather fiddly, but your virtual server definition
should probably look something like this:
(nntp "firewall" (nntp-open-connection-function nntp-open-via-rlogin-and-netcat) (nntp-via-address "the.firewall.machine") (nntp-address "the.real.nntp.host")) |
If you want to use the wonderful ssh
program to provide a
compressed connection over the modem line, you could add the following
configuration to the example above:
(nntp-via-rlogin-command "ssh") |
See also nntp-via-rlogin-command-switches
. Here’s an example for
an indirect connection:
(setq gnus-select-method '(nntp "indirect" (nntp-address "news.server.example") (nntp-via-user-name "intermediate_user_name") (nntp-via-address "intermediate.host.example") (nntp-via-rlogin-command "ssh") (nntp-via-rlogin-command-switches ("-C")) (nntp-open-connection-function nntp-open-via-rlogin-and-netcat))) |
This means that you have to have set up ssh-agent
correctly to
provide automatic authorization, of course.
If you’re behind a firewall, but have direct access to the outside world through a wrapper command like "runsocks", you could open a socksified netcat connection to the news server as follows:
(nntp "outside" (nntp-pre-command "runsocks") (nntp-open-connection-function nntp-open-netcat-stream) (nntp-address "the.news.server")) |
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If you’re saving lots of articles in the cache by using persistent articles, you may want to create a virtual server to read the cache.
First you need to add a new server. The a command does that. It
would probably be best to use nnml
to read the cache. You
could also use nnspool
or nnmh
, though.
Type a nnml RET cache RET.
You should now have a brand new nnml
virtual server called
‘cache’. You now need to edit it to have the right definitions.
Type e to edit the server. You’ll be entered into a buffer that
will contain the following:
(nnml "cache") |
Change that to:
(nnml "cache" (nnml-directory "~/News/cache/") (nnml-active-file "~/News/cache/active")) |
Type C-c C-c to return to the server buffer. If you now press RET over this virtual server, you should be entered into a browse buffer, and you should be able to enter any of the groups displayed.
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One sticky point when defining variables (both on back ends and in Emacs in general) is that some variables are typically initialized from other variables when the definition of the variables is being loaded. If you change the “base” variable after the variables have been loaded, you won’t change the “derived” variables.
This typically affects directory and file variables. For instance,
nnml-directory
is ‘~/Mail/’ by default, and all nnml
directory variables are initialized from that variable, so
nnml-active-file
will be ‘~/Mail/active’. If you define a
new virtual nnml
server, it will not suffice to set just
nnml-directory
—you have to explicitly set all the file
variables to be what you want them to be. For a complete list of
variables for each back end, see each back end’s section later in this
manual, but here’s an example nnml
definition:
(nnml "public" (nnml-directory "~/my-mail/") (nnml-active-file "~/my-mail/active") (nnml-newsgroups-file "~/my-mail/newsgroups")) |
Server variables are often called server parameters.
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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.
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If a server seems to be unreachable, Gnus will mark that server as
denied
. That means that any subsequent attempt to make contact
with that server will just be ignored. “It can’t be opened,” Gnus
will tell you, without making the least effort to see whether that is
actually the case or not.
That might seem quite naughty, but it does make sense most of the time. Let’s say you have 10 groups subscribed to on server ‘nephelococcygia.com’. This server is located somewhere quite far away from you and the machine is quite slow, so it takes 1 minute just to find out that it refuses connection to you today. If Gnus were to attempt to do that 10 times, you’d be quite annoyed, so Gnus won’t attempt to do that. Once it has gotten a single “connection refused”, it will regard that server as “down”.
So, what happens if the machine was only feeling unwell temporarily? How do you test to see whether the machine has come up again?
You jump to the server buffer (see section Server Buffer) and poke it with the following commands:
Try to establish connection to the server on the current line
(gnus-server-open-server
).
Close the connection (if any) to the server
(gnus-server-close-server
).
Mark the current server as unreachable
(gnus-server-deny-server
).
Open the connections to all servers in the buffer
(gnus-server-open-all-servers
).
Close the connections to all servers in the buffer
(gnus-server-close-all-servers
).
Remove all marks to whether Gnus was denied connection from any servers
(gnus-server-remove-denials
).
Copy a server and give it a new name
(gnus-server-copy-server
). This can be useful if you have a
complex method definition, and want to use the same definition towards
a different (physical) server.
Set server status to offline (gnus-server-offline-server
).
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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.
6.2.1 NNTP | Reading news from an NNTP server. | |
6.2.2 News Spool | Reading news from the local spool. |
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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 section 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
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 it sends the command MODE READER
to the server with the
nntp-send-mode-reader
function. This function should always be
present in this hook.
nntp-authinfo-function
This function will be used to send ‘AUTHINFO’ to the NNTP
server. The default function is nntp-send-authinfo
, which looks
through your ‘~/.authinfo’ (or whatever you’ve set the
nntp-authinfo-file
variable to) for applicable entries. If none
are found, it will prompt you for a login name and a password. The
format of the ‘~/.authinfo’ file is (almost) the same as the
ftp
‘~/.netrc’ file, which is defined in the ftp
manual page, but here are the salient facts:
The valid tokens include ‘machine’, ‘login’, ‘password’,
‘default’. In addition Gnus introduces two new tokens, not present
in the original ‘.netrc’/ftp
syntax, namely ‘port’ and
‘force’. (This is the only way the ‘.authinfo’ file format
deviates from the ‘.netrc’ file format.) ‘port’ is used to
indicate what port on the server the credentials apply to and
‘force’ is explained below.
Here’s an example file:
machine news.uio.no login larsi password geheimnis machine nntp.ifi.uio.no login larsi force yes |
The token/value pairs may appear in any order; ‘machine’ doesn’t have to be first, for instance.
In this example, both login name and password have been supplied for the former server, while the latter has only the login name listed, and the user will be prompted for the password. The latter also has the ‘force’ tag, which means that the authinfo will be sent to the nntp server upon connection; the default (i.e., when there is not ‘force’ tag) is to not send authinfo to the nntp server until the nntp server asks for it.
You can also add ‘default’ lines that will apply to all servers that don’t have matching ‘machine’ lines.
default force yes |
This will force sending ‘AUTHINFO’ commands to all servers not previously mentioned.
Remember to not leave the ‘~/.authinfo’ file world-readable.
nntp-server-action-alist
This is a 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 back end
will collect headers by sending a series of head
commands. To
speed things up, the back end sends lots of these commands without
waiting for reply, and then reads all the replies. This is controlled
by the nntp-maximum-request
variable, and is 400 by default. If
your network is buggy, you should set this to 1.
nntp-connection-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
back end should wait for a
connection before giving up. If it is nil
, which is the default,
no timeouts are done.
nntp-nov-is-evil
If the NNTP server does not support NOV, you could set this
variable to t
, but nntp
usually checks automatically whether NOV
can be used.
nntp-xover-commands
List of strings 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 will not need. This variable says how
big a gap between two consecutive articles is allowed to be before the
XOVER
request is split into several request. Note that if your
network is fast, setting this variable to a really small number means
that fetching will probably be slower. If this variable is nil
,
nntp
will never split requests. The default is 5.
nntp-xref-number-is-evil
When Gnus refers to an article having the Message-ID
that a user
specifies or having the Message-ID
of the parent article of the
current one (see section Finding the Parent), Gnus sends a HEAD
command to the NNTP server to know where it is, and the server
returns the data containing the pairs of a group and an article number
in the Xref
header. Gnus normally uses the article number to
refer to the article if the data shows that that article is in the
current group, while it uses the Message-ID
otherwise. However,
some news servers, e.g., ones running Diablo, run multiple engines
having the same articles but article numbers are not kept synchronized
between them. In that case, the article number that appears in the
Xref
header varies by which engine is chosen, so you cannot refer
to the parent article that is in the current group, for instance. If
you connect to such a server, set this variable to a non-nil
value, and Gnus never uses article numbers. For example:
(setq gnus-select-method '(nntp "newszilla" (nntp-address "newszilla.example.com") (nntp-xref-number-is-evil t) …)) |
The default value of this server variable is nil
.
nntp-prepare-server-hook
A hook run before attempting to connect to an NNTP server.
nntp-record-commands
If non-nil
, nntp
will log all commands it sends to the
NNTP server (along with a timestamp) in the ‘*nntp-log*’
buffer. This is useful if you are debugging a Gnus/NNTP connection
that doesn’t seem to work.
nntp-open-connection-function
It is possible to customize how the connection to the nntp server will
be opened. If you specify an nntp-open-connection-function
parameter, Gnus will use that function to establish the connection.
Seven pre-made functions are supplied. These functions can be grouped
in two categories: direct connection functions (four pre-made), and
indirect ones (three pre-made).
nntp-never-echoes-commands
Non-nil
means the nntp server never echoes commands. It is
reported that some nntps server doesn’t echo commands. So, you may want
to set this to non-nil
in the method for such a server setting
nntp-open-connection-function
to nntp-open-ssl-stream
for
example. The default value is nil
. Note that the
nntp-open-connection-functions-never-echo-commands
variable
overrides the nil
value of this variable.
nntp-open-connection-functions-never-echo-commands
List of functions that never echo commands. Add or set a function which
you set to nntp-open-connection-function
to this list if it does
not echo commands. Note that a non-nil
value of the
nntp-never-echoes-commands
variable overrides this variable. The
default value is (nntp-open-network-stream)
.
nntp-prepare-post-hook
A hook run just before posting an article. If there is no
Message-ID
header in the article and the news server provides the
recommended ID, it will be added to the article before running this
hook. It is useful to make Cancel-Lock
headers even if you
inhibit Gnus to add a Message-ID
header, you could say:
(add-hook 'nntp-prepare-post-hook 'canlock-insert-header) |
Note that not all servers support the recommended ID. This works for INN versions 2.3.0 and later, for instance.
nntp-server-list-active-group
If nil
, then always use ‘GROUP’ instead of ‘LIST
ACTIVE’. This is usually slower, but on misconfigured servers that
don’t update their active files often, this can help.
6.2.1.1 Direct Functions | Connecting directly to the server. | |
6.2.1.2 Indirect Functions | Connecting indirectly to the server. | |
6.2.1.3 Common Variables | Understood by several connection functions. |
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
These functions are called direct because they open a direct connection between your machine and the NNTP server. The behavior of these functions is also affected by commonly understood variables (see section Common Variables).
nntp-open-network-stream
This is the default, and simply connects to some port or other on the remote system. If both Emacs and the server supports it, the connection will be upgraded to an encrypted STARTTLS connection automatically.
network-only
The same as the above, but don’t do automatic STARTTLS upgrades.
nntp-open-tls-stream
Opens a connection to a server over a secure channel. To use this you must have GnuTLS installed. You then define a server as follows:
;; "nntps" is port 563 and is predefined in our ‘/etc/services’ ;; however, ‘gnutls-cli -p’ doesn't like named ports. ;; (nntp "snews.bar.com" (nntp-open-connection-function nntp-open-tls-stream) (nntp-port-number 563) (nntp-address "snews.bar.com")) |
nntp-open-ssl-stream
Opens a connection to a server over a secure channel. To use this you must have OpenSSL installed. You then define a server as follows:
;; "snews" is port 563 and is predefined in our ‘/etc/services’ ;; however, ‘openssl s_client -port’ doesn't like named ports. ;; (nntp "snews.bar.com" (nntp-open-connection-function nntp-open-ssl-stream) (nntp-port-number 563) (nntp-address "snews.bar.com")) |
nntp-open-netcat-stream
Opens a connection to an NNTP server using the netcat
program. You might wonder why this function exists, since we have
the default nntp-open-network-stream
which would do the job. (One
of) the reason(s) is that if you are behind a firewall but have direct
connections to the outside world thanks to a command wrapper like
runsocks
, you can use it like this:
(nntp "socksified" (nntp-pre-command "runsocks") (nntp-open-connection-function nntp-open-netcat-stream) (nntp-address "the.news.server")) |
With the default method, you would need to wrap your whole Emacs session, which is not a good idea.
nntp-open-telnet-stream
Like nntp-open-netcat-stream
, but uses telnet
rather than
netcat
. telnet
is a bit less robust because of things
like line-end-conversion, but sometimes netcat is simply
not available. The previous example would turn into:
(nntp "socksified" (nntp-pre-command "runsocks") (nntp-open-connection-function nntp-open-telnet-stream) (nntp-address "the.news.server") (nntp-end-of-line "\n")) |
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These functions are called indirect because they connect to an intermediate host before actually connecting to the NNTP server. All of these functions and related variables are also said to belong to the “via” family of connection: they’re all prefixed with “via” to make things cleaner. The behavior of these functions is also affected by commonly understood variables (see section Common Variables).
nntp-open-via-rlogin-and-netcat
Does an ‘rlogin’ on a remote system, and then uses netcat
to connect
to the real NNTP server from there. This is useful for instance if
you need to connect to a firewall machine first.
nntp-open-via-rlogin-and-netcat
-specific variables:
nntp-via-rlogin-command
Command used to log in on the intermediate host. The default is ‘rsh’, but ‘ssh’ is a popular alternative.
nntp-via-rlogin-command-switches
List of strings to be used as the switches to
nntp-via-rlogin-command
. The default is nil
. If you use
‘ssh’ for nntp-via-rlogin-command
, you may set this to
‘("-C")’ in order to compress all data connections.
nntp-open-via-rlogin-and-telnet
Does essentially the same, but uses telnet
instead of ‘netcat’
to connect to the real NNTP server from the intermediate host.
telnet
is a bit less robust because of things like
line-end-conversion, but sometimes netcat
is simply not available.
nntp-open-via-rlogin-and-telnet
-specific variables:
nntp-telnet-command
Command used to connect to the real NNTP server from the intermediate host. The default is ‘telnet’.
nntp-telnet-switches
List of strings to be used as the switches to the
nntp-telnet-command
command. The default is ("-8")
.
nntp-via-rlogin-command
Command used to log in on the intermediate host. The default is ‘rsh’, but ‘ssh’ is a popular alternative.
nntp-via-rlogin-command-switches
List of strings to be used as the switches to
nntp-via-rlogin-command
. If you use ‘ssh’, you may need to set
this to ‘("-t" "-e" "none")’ or ‘("-C" "-t" "-e" "none")’ if
the telnet command requires a pseudo-tty allocation on an intermediate
host. The default is nil
.
Note that you may want to change the value for nntp-end-of-line
to ‘\n’ (see section Common Variables).
nntp-open-via-telnet-and-telnet
Does essentially the same, but uses ‘telnet’ instead of ‘rlogin’ to connect to the intermediate host.
nntp-open-via-telnet-and-telnet
-specific variables:
nntp-via-telnet-command
Command used to telnet
the intermediate host. The default is
‘telnet’.
nntp-via-telnet-switches
List of strings to be used as the switches to the
nntp-via-telnet-command
command. The default is ‘("-8")’.
nntp-via-user-password
Password to use when logging in on the intermediate host.
nntp-via-envuser
If non-nil
, the intermediate telnet
session (client and
server both) will support the ENVIRON
option and not prompt for
login name. This works for Solaris telnet
, for instance.
nntp-via-shell-prompt
Regexp matching the shell prompt on the intermediate host. The default is ‘bash\\|\$ *\r?$\\|> *\r?’.
Note that you may want to change the value for nntp-end-of-line
to ‘\n’ (see section Common Variables).
Here are some additional variables that are understood by all the above functions:
nntp-via-user-name
User name to use when connecting to the intermediate host.
nntp-via-address
Address of the intermediate host to connect to.
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
The following variables affect the behavior of all, or several of the
pre-made connection functions. When not specified, all functions are
affected (the values of the following variables will be used as the
default if each virtual nntp
server doesn’t specify those server
variables individually).
nntp-pre-command
A command wrapper to use when connecting through a non native
connection function (all except nntp-open-network-stream
,
nntp-open-tls-stream
, and nntp-open-ssl-stream
). This is
where you would put a ‘SOCKS’ wrapper for instance.
nntp-address
The address of the NNTP server.
nntp-port-number
Port number to connect to the NNTP server. The default is ‘nntp’. If you use NNTP over TLS/SSL, you may want to use integer ports rather than named ports (i.e., use ‘563’ instead of ‘snews’ or ‘nntps’), because external TLS/SSL tools may not work with named ports.
nntp-end-of-line
String to use as end-of-line marker when talking to the NNTP server. This is ‘\r\n’ by default, but should be ‘\n’ when using a non native telnet connection function.
nntp-netcat-command
Command to use when connecting to the NNTP server through ‘netcat’. This is not for an intermediate host. This is just for the real NNTP server. The default is ‘nc’.
nntp-netcat-switches
A list of switches to pass to nntp-netcat-command
. The default
is ‘()’.
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Subscribing to a foreign group from the local spool is extremely easy, and might be useful, for instance, to speed up reading groups that contain very big articles—‘alt.binaries.pictures.furniture’, for instance.
Anyway, you just specify nnspool
as the method and ""
(or
anything else) as the address.
If you have access to a local spool, you should probably use that as the
native select method (see section 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 name of the active file.
nnspool-newsgroups-file
The name of the group descriptions file.
nnspool-history-file
The name of the news history file.
nnspool-active-times-file
The name 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.
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The most popular mail backend is probably nnimap
, which
provides access to IMAP servers. IMAP servers
store mail remotely, so the client doesn’t store anything locally.
This means that it’s a convenient choice when you’re reading your mail
from different locations, or with different user agents.
6.3.1 Connecting to an IMAP Server | Getting started with IMAP. | |
6.3.2 Customizing the IMAP Connection | Variables for IMAP connection. | |
6.3.3 Client-Side IMAP Splitting | Put mail in the correct mail box. |
[ < ] | [ > ] | [ << ] | [ Up ] | [ >> ] | [Top] | [Contents] | [Index] | [ ? ] |
Connecting to an IMAP can be very easy. Type B in the group buffer, or (if your primary interest is reading email), say something like:
(setq gnus-select-method '(nnimap "imap.gmail.com")) |
You’ll be prompted for a user name and password. If you grow tired of that, then add the following to your ‘~/.authinfo’ file:
machine imap.gmail.com login <username> password <password> port imap |
That should basically be it for most users.
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Here’s an example method that’s more complex:
(nnimap "imap.gmail.com" (nnimap-inbox "INBOX") (nnimap-split-methods default) (nnimap-expunge t) (nnimap-stream ssl)) |
nnimap-address
The address of the server, like ‘imap.gmail.com’.
nnimap-server-port
If the server uses a non-standard port, that can be specified here. A
typical port would be "imap"
or "imaps"
.
nnimap-stream
How nnimap
should connect to the server. Possible values are:
undecided
This is the default, and this first tries the ssl
setting, and
then tries the network
setting.
ssl
This uses standard TLS/SSL connections.
network
Non-encrypted and unsafe straight socket connection, but will upgrade to encrypted STARTTLS if both Emacs and the server supports it.
starttls
Encrypted STARTTLS over the normal IMAP port.
shell
If you need to tunnel via other systems to connect to the server, you
can use this option, and customize nnimap-shell-program
to be
what you need.
nnimap-authenticator
Some IMAP servers allow anonymous logins. In that case,
this should be set to anonymous
. If this variable isn’t set,
the normal login methods will be used. If you wish to specify a
specific login method to be used, you can set this variable to either
login
(the traditional IMAP login method),
plain
or cram-md5
.
nnimap-expunge
If non-nil
, expunge articles after deleting them. This is always done
if the server supports UID EXPUNGE, but it’s not done by default on
servers that doesn’t support that command.
nnimap-streaming
Virtually all IMAP server support fast streaming of data.
If you have problems connecting to the server, try setting this to
nil
.
nnimap-fetch-partial-articles
If non-nil
, fetch partial articles from the server. If set to
a string, then it’s interpreted as a regexp, and parts that have
matching types will be fetched. For instance, ‘"text/"’ will
fetch all textual parts, while leaving the rest on the server.
nnimap-record-commands
If non-nil
, record all IMAP commands in the
‘"*imap log*"’ buffer.
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Many people prefer to do the sorting/splitting of mail into their mail boxes on the IMAP server. That way they don’t have to download the mail they’re not all that interested in.
If you do want to do client-side mail splitting, then the following variables are relevant:
nnimap-inbox
This is the IMAP mail box that will be scanned for new mail. This can also be a list of mail box names.
nnimap-split-methods
Uses the same syntax as nnmail-split-methods
(see section Splitting Mail), except the symbol default
, which means that it should
use the value of the nnmail-split-methods
variable.
nnimap-split-fancy
Uses the same syntax as nnmail-split-fancy
.
nnimap-unsplittable-articles
List of flag symbols to ignore when doing splitting. That is, articles that have these flags won’t be considered when splitting. The default is ‘(%Deleted %Seen)’.
Here’s a complete example nnimap
backend with a client-side
“fancy” splitting method:
(nnimap "imap.example.com" (nnimap-inbox "INBOX") (nnimap-split-methods (| ("MailScanner-SpamCheck" "spam" "spam.detected") (to "foo@bar.com" "foo") "undecided"))) |
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Reading mail with a newsreader—isn’t that just plain WeIrD? But of course.
6.4.1 Mail in a Newsreader | Important introductory notes. | |
6.4.2 Getting Started Reading Mail | A simple cookbook example. | |
6.4.3 Splitting Mail | How to create mail groups. | |
6.4.4 Mail Sources | How to tell Gnus where to get mail from. | |
6.4.5 Mail Back End Variables | Variables for customizing mail handling. | |
6.4.6 Fancy Mail Splitting | Gnus can do hairy splitting of incoming mail. | |
6.4.7 Group Mail Splitting | Use group customize to drive mail splitting. | |
6.4.8 Incorporating Old Mail | What about the old mail you have? | |
6.4.9 Expiring Mail | Getting rid of unwanted mail. | |
6.4.10 Washing Mail | Removing cruft from the mail you get. | |
6.4.11 Duplicates | Dealing with duplicated mail. | |
6.4.12 Not Reading Mail | Using mail back ends for reading other files. | |
6.4.13 Choosing a Mail Back End | Gnus can read a variety of mail formats. |
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If you are used to traditional mail readers, but have decided to switch to reading mail with Gnus, you may find yourself experiencing something of a culture shock.
Gnus does not behave like traditional mail readers. If you want to make it behave that way, you can, but it’s an uphill battle.
Gnus, by default, handles all its groups using the same approach. This approach is very newsreaderly—you enter a group, see the new/unread messages, and when you read the messages, they get marked as read, and you don’t see them any more. (Unless you explicitly ask for them.)
In particular, you do not do anything explicitly to delete messages.
Does this mean that all the messages that have been marked as read are deleted? How awful!
But, no, it means that old messages are expired according to some scheme or other. For news messages, the expire process is controlled by the news administrator; for mail, the expire process is controlled by you. The expire process for mail is covered in depth in Expiring Mail.
What many Gnus users find, after using it a while for both news and mail, is that the transport mechanism has very little to do with how they want to treat a message.
Many people subscribe to several mailing lists. These are transported via SMTP, and are therefore mail. But we might go for weeks without answering, or even reading these messages very carefully. We may not need to save them because if we should need to read one again, they are archived somewhere else.
Some people have local news groups which have only a handful of readers. These are transported via NNTP, and are therefore news. But we may need to read and answer a large fraction of the messages very carefully in order to do our work. And there may not be an archive, so we may need to save the interesting messages the same way we would personal mail.
The important distinction turns out to be not the transport mechanism, but other factors such as how interested we are in the subject matter, or how easy it is to retrieve the message if we need to read it again.
Gnus provides many options for sorting mail into “groups” which behave like newsgroups, and for treating each group (whether mail or news) differently.
Some users never get comfortable using the Gnus (ahem) paradigm and wish that Gnus should grow up and be a male, er, mail reader. It is possible to whip Gnus into a more mailreaderly being, but, as said before, it’s not easy. People who prefer proper mail readers should try VM instead, which is an excellent, and proper, mail reader.
I don’t mean to scare anybody off, but I want to make it clear that you may be required to learn a new way of thinking about messages. After you’ve been subjected to The Gnus Way, you will come to love it. I can guarantee it. (At least the guy who sold me the Emacs Subliminal Brain-Washing Functions that I’ve put into Gnus did guarantee it. You Will Be Assimilated. You Love Gnus. You Love The Gnus Mail Way. You Do.)
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It’s quite easy to use Gnus to read your new mail. You just plonk the
mail back end of your choice into gnus-secondary-select-methods
,
and things will happen automatically.
For instance, if you want to use nnml
(which is a “one file per
mail” back end), you could put the following in your ‘~/.gnus.el’ file:
(setq gnus-secondary-select-methods '((nnml ""))) |
Now, the next time you start Gnus, this back end will be queried for new articles, and it will move all the messages in your spool file to its directory, which is ‘~/Mail/’ by default. The new group that will be created (‘mail.misc’) will be subscribed, and you can read it like any other group.
You will probably want to split the mail into several groups, though:
(setq nnmail-split-methods '(("junk" "^From:.*Lars Ingebrigtsen") ("crazy" "^Subject:.*die\\|^Organization:.*flabby") ("other" ""))) |
This will result in three new nnml
mail groups being created:
‘nnml:junk’, ‘nnml:crazy’, and ‘nnml:other’. All the
mail that doesn’t fit into the first two groups will be placed in the
last group.
This should be sufficient for reading mail with Gnus. You might want to give the other sections in this part of the manual a perusal, though. Especially see section Choosing a Mail Back End and see section Expiring Mail.
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The nnmail-split-methods
variable says how the incoming mail is
to be split into groups.
(setq nnmail-split-methods '(("mail.junk" "^From:.*Lars Ingebrigtsen") ("mail.crazy" "^Subject:.*die\\|^Organization:.*flabby") ("mail.other" ""))) |
This variable is a list of lists, where the first element of each of
these lists is the name of the mail group (they do not have to be called
something beginning with ‘mail’, by the way), and the second
element is a regular expression used on the header of each mail to
determine if it belongs in this mail group. The first string may
contain ‘\\1’ forms, like the ones used by replace-match
to
insert sub-expressions from the matched text. For instance:
("list.\\1" "From:.* \\(.*\\)-list@majordomo.com") |
In that case, nnmail-split-lowercase-expanded
controls whether
the inserted text should be made lowercase. See section Fancy Mail Splitting.
The second element can also be a function. In that case, it will be
called narrowed to the headers with the first element of the rule as the
argument. It should return a non-nil
value if it thinks that the
mail belongs in that group.
The last of these groups should always be a general one, and the regular
expression should always be ‘""’ so that it matches any mails
that haven’t been matched by any of the other regexps. (These rules are
processed from the beginning of the alist toward the end. The first rule
to make a match will “win”, unless you have crossposting enabled. In
that case, all matching rules will “win”.) If no rule matched, the mail
will end up in the ‘bogus’ group. When new groups are created by
splitting mail, you may want to run gnus-group-find-new-groups
to
see the new groups. This also applies to the ‘bogus’ group.
If you like to tinker with this yourself, you can set this variable to a function of your choice. This function will be called without any arguments in a buffer narrowed to the headers of an incoming mail message. The function should return a list of group names that it thinks should carry this mail message.
This variable can also be a fancy split method. For the syntax, see Fancy Mail Splitting.
Note that the mail back ends are free to maul the poor, innocent,
incoming headers all they want to. They all add Lines
headers;
some add X-Gnus-Group
headers; most rename the Unix mbox
From<SPACE>
line to something else.
The mail back ends all support cross-posting. If several regexps match,
the mail will be “cross-posted” to all those groups.
nnmail-crosspost
says whether to use this mechanism or not. Note
that no articles are crossposted to the general (‘""’) group.
nnmh
and nnml
makes crossposts by creating hard links to
the crossposted articles. However, not all file systems support hard
links. If that’s the case for you, set
nnmail-crosspost-link-function
to copy-file
. (This
variable is add-name-to-file
by default.)
If you wish to see where the previous mail split put the messages, you
can use the M-x nnmail-split-history command. If you wish to see
where re-spooling messages would put the messages, you can use
gnus-summary-respool-trace
and related commands (see section Mail Group Commands).
Header lines longer than the value of
nnmail-split-header-length-limit
are excluded from the split
function.
By default, splitting does not decode headers, so you can not match on
non-ASCII strings. But it is useful if you want to match
articles based on the raw header data. To enable it, set the
nnmail-mail-splitting-decodes
variable to a non-nil
value.
In addition, the value of the nnmail-mail-splitting-charset
variable is used for decoding non-MIME encoded string when
nnmail-mail-splitting-decodes
is non-nil
. The default
value is nil
which means not to decode non-MIME encoded
string. A suitable value for you will be undecided
or be the
charset used normally in mails you are interested in.
By default, splitting is performed on all incoming messages. If you
specify a directory
entry for the variable mail-sources
(see section Mail Source Specifiers), however, then splitting does
not happen by default. You can set the variable
nnmail-resplit-incoming
to a non-nil
value to make
splitting happen even in this case. (This variable has no effect on
other kinds of entries.)
Gnus gives you all the opportunity you could possibly want for shooting yourself in the foot. Let’s say you create a group that will contain all the mail you get from your boss. And then you accidentally unsubscribe from the group. Gnus will still put all the mail from your boss in the unsubscribed group, and so, when your boss mails you “Have that report ready by Monday or you’re fired!”, you’ll never see it and, come Tuesday, you’ll still believe that you’re gainfully employed while you really should be out collecting empty bottles to save up for next month’s rent money.
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Mail can be gotten from many different sources—the mail spool, from a POP mail server, from a procmail directory, or from a maildir, for instance.
6.4.4.1 Mail Source Specifiers | How to specify what a mail source is. | |
6.4.4.2 Function Interface | ||
6.4.4.3 Mail Source Customization | Some variables that influence things. | |
6.4.4.4 Fetching Mail | Using the mail source specifiers. |
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You tell Gnus how to fetch mail by setting mail-sources
(see section Fetching Mail) to a mail source specifier.
Here’s an example:
(pop :server "pop3.mailserver.com" :user "myname") |
As can be observed, a mail source specifier is a list where the first element is a mail source type, followed by an arbitrary number of keywords. Keywords that are not explicitly specified are given default values.
The mail-sources
is global for all mail groups. You can specify
an additional mail source for a particular group by including the
group
mail specifier in mail-sources
, and setting a
mail-source
group parameter (see section Group Parameters) specifying
a single mail source. When this is used, mail-sources
is
typically just (group)
; the mail-source
parameter for a
group might look like this:
(mail-source . (file :path "home/user/spools/foo.spool")) |
This means that the group’s (and only this group’s) messages will be fetched from the spool file ‘/user/spools/foo.spool’.
The following mail source types are available:
file
Get mail from a single file; typically from the mail spool.
Keywords:
:path
The file name. Defaults to the value of the MAIL
environment variable or the value of rmail-spool-directory
(usually something like ‘/usr/mail/spool/user-name’).
:prescript
:postscript
Script run before/after fetching mail.
An example file mail source:
(file :path "/usr/spool/mail/user-name") |
Or using the default file name:
(file) |
If the mail spool file is not located on the local machine, it’s best to use POP or IMAP or the like to fetch the mail. You can not use ange-ftp file names here—it has no way to lock the mail spool while moving the mail.
If it’s impossible to set up a proper server, you can use ssh instead.
(setq mail-sources '((file :prescript "ssh host bin/getmail >%t"))) |
The ‘getmail’ script would look something like the following:
#!/bin/sh # getmail - move mail from spool to stdout # flu@iki.fi MOVEMAIL=/usr/lib/emacs/20.3/i386-redhat-linux/movemail TMP=$HOME/Mail/tmp rm -f $TMP; $MOVEMAIL $MAIL $TMP >/dev/null && cat $TMP |
Alter this script to fit the ‘movemail’ and temporary file you want to use.
directory
Get mail from several files in a directory. This is typically used
when you have procmail split the incoming mail into several files.
That is, there is a one-to-one correspondence between files in that
directory and groups, so that mail from the file ‘foo.bar.spool’
will be put in the group foo.bar
. (You can change the suffix
to be used instead of .spool
.) Setting
nnmail-scan-directory-mail-source-once
to non-nil
forces
Gnus to scan the mail source only once. This is particularly useful
if you want to scan mail groups at a specified level.
There is also the variable nnmail-resplit-incoming
, if you set
that to a non-nil
value, then the normal splitting process is
applied to all the files from the directory, Splitting Mail.
Keywords:
:path
The name of the directory where the files are. There is no default value.
:suffix
Only files ending with this suffix are used. The default is ‘.spool’.
:predicate
Only files that have this predicate return non-nil
are returned.
The default is identity
. This is used as an additional
filter—only files that have the right suffix and satisfy this
predicate are considered.
:prescript
:postscript
Script run before/after fetching mail.
An example directory mail source:
(directory :path "/home/user-name/procmail-dir/" :suffix ".prcml") |
pop
Get mail from a POP server.
Keywords:
:server
The name of the POP server. The default is taken from the
MAILHOST
environment variable.
:port
The port number of the POP server. This can be a number (e.g., ‘:port 1234’) or a string (e.g., ‘:port "pop3"’). If it is a string, it should be a service name as listed in ‘/etc/services’ on Unix systems. The default is ‘"pop3"’. On some systems you might need to specify it as ‘"pop-3"’ instead.
:user
The user name to give to the POP server. The default is the login name.
:password
The password to give to the POP server. If not specified, the user is prompted.
:program
The program to use to fetch mail from the POP server. This
should be a format
-like string. Here’s an example:
fetchmail %u@%s -P %p %t |
The valid format specifier characters are:
The name of the file the mail is to be moved to. This must always be included in this string.
The name of the server.
The port number of the server.
The user name to use.
The password to use.
The values used for these specs are taken from the values you give the corresponding keywords.
:prescript
A script to be run before fetching the mail. The syntax is the same as
the :program
keyword. This can also be a function to be run.
One popular way to use this is to set up an SSH tunnel to access the POP server. Here’s an example:
(pop :server "127.0.0.1" :port 1234 :user "foo" :password "secret" :prescript "nohup ssh -f -L 1234:pop.server:110 remote.host sleep 3600 &") |
:postscript
A script to be run after fetching the mail. The syntax is the same as
the :program
keyword. This can also be a function to be run.
:function
The function to use to fetch mail from the POP server. The function is called with one parameter—the name of the file where the mail should be moved to.
:authentication
This can be either the symbol password
or the symbol apop
and says what authentication scheme to use. The default is
password
.
:leave
Non-nil
if the mail is to be left on the POP server
after fetching. Only the built-in pop3-movemail
program (the
default) supports this keyword.
If this is a number, leave mails on the server for this many days since
you first checked new mails. In that case, mails once fetched will
never be fetched again by the UIDL control. If this is
nil
(the default), mails will be deleted on the server right
after fetching. If this is neither nil
nor a number, all mails
will be left on the server, and you will end up getting the same mails
again and again.
The pop3-uidl-file
variable specifies the file to which the
UIDL data are locally stored. The default value is
‘~/.pop3-uidl’.
Note that POP servers maintain no state information between sessions, so what the client believes is there and what is actually there may not match up. If they do not, then you may get duplicate mails or the whole thing can fall apart and leave you with a corrupt mailbox.
If the :program
and :function
keywords aren’t specified,
pop3-movemail
will be used.
Here are some examples for getting mail from a POP server.
Fetch from the default POP server, using the default user name, and default fetcher:
(pop) |
Fetch from a named server with a named user and password:
(pop :server "my.pop.server" :user "user-name" :password "secret") |
Leave mails on the server for 14 days:
(pop :server "my.pop.server" :user "user-name" :password "secret" :leave 14) |
Use ‘movemail’ to move the mail:
(pop :program "movemail po:%u %t %p") |
maildir
Get mail from a maildir. This is a type of mailbox that is supported by at least qmail and postfix, where each file in a special directory contains exactly one mail.
Keywords:
:path
The name of the directory where the mails are stored. The default is
taken from the MAILDIR
environment variable or
‘~/Maildir/’.
:subdirs
The subdirectories of the Maildir. The default is ‘("new" "cur")’.
You can also get mails from remote hosts (because maildirs don’t suffer from locking problems).
Two example maildir mail sources:
(maildir :path "/home/user-name/Maildir/" :subdirs ("cur" "new")) |
(maildir :path "/user@remotehost.org:~/Maildir/" :subdirs ("new")) |
imap
Get mail from a IMAP server. If you don’t want to use IMAP as intended, as a network mail reading protocol (i.e., with nnimap), for some reason or other, Gnus let you treat it similar to a POP server and fetches articles from a given IMAP mailbox. See section Using IMAP, for more information.
Keywords:
:server
The name of the IMAP server. The default is taken from the
MAILHOST
environment variable.
:port
The port number of the IMAP server. The default is ‘143’, or ‘993’ for TLS/SSL connections.
:user
The user name to give to the IMAP server. The default is the login name.
:password
The password to give to the IMAP server. If not specified, the user is prompted.
:stream
What stream to use for connecting to the server, this is one of the
symbols in imap-stream-alist
. Right now, this means
‘gssapi’, ‘kerberos4’, ‘starttls’, ‘tls’,
‘ssl’, ‘shell’ or the default ‘network’.
:authentication
Which authenticator to use for authenticating to the server, this is
one of the symbols in imap-authenticator-alist
. Right now,
this means ‘gssapi’, ‘kerberos4’, ‘digest-md5’,
‘cram-md5’, ‘anonymous’ or the default ‘login’.
:program
When using the ‘shell’ :stream, the contents of this variable is
mapped into the imap-shell-program
variable. This should be a
format
-like string (or list of strings). Here’s an example:
ssh %s imapd |
Make sure nothing is interfering with the output of the program, e.g., don’t forget to redirect the error output to the void. The valid format specifier characters are:
The name of the server.
User name from imap-default-user
.
The port number of the server.
The values used for these specs are taken from the values you give the corresponding keywords.
:mailbox
The name of the mailbox to get mail from. The default is ‘INBOX’ which normally is the mailbox which receives incoming mail.
:predicate
The predicate used to find articles to fetch. The default, ‘UNSEEN UNDELETED’, is probably the best choice for most people, but if you sometimes peek in your mailbox with a IMAP client and mark some articles as read (or; SEEN) you might want to set this to ‘1:*’. Then all articles in the mailbox is fetched, no matter what. For a complete list of predicates, see RFC 2060 section 6.4.4.
:fetchflag
How to flag fetched articles on the server, the default ‘\Deleted’ will mark them as deleted, an alternative would be ‘\Seen’ which would simply mark them as read. These are the two most likely choices, but more flags are defined in RFC 2060 section 2.3.2.
:dontexpunge
If non-nil
, don’t remove all articles marked as deleted in the
mailbox after finishing the fetch.
An example IMAP mail source:
(imap :server "mail.mycorp.com" :stream kerberos4 :fetchflag "\\Seen") |
group
Get the actual mail source from the mail-source
group parameter,
See section Group Parameters.
Common keywords can be used in any type of mail source.
Keywords:
:plugged
If non-nil
, fetch the mail even when Gnus is unplugged. If you
use directory source to get mail, you can specify it as in this
example:
(setq mail-sources '((directory :path "/home/pavel/.Spool/" :suffix "" :plugged t))) |
Gnus will then fetch your mail even when you are unplugged. This is useful when you use local mail and news.
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Some of the above keywords specify a Lisp function to be executed.
For each keyword :foo
, the Lisp variable foo
is bound to
the value of the keyword while the function is executing. For example,
consider the following mail-source setting:
(setq mail-sources '((pop :user "jrl" :server "pophost" :function fetchfunc))) |
While the function fetchfunc
is executing, the symbol user
is bound to "jrl"
, and the symbol server
is bound to
"pophost"
. The symbols port
, password
,
program
, prescript
, postscript
, function
,
and authentication
are also bound (to their default values).
See above for a list of keywords for each type of mail source.
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The following is a list of variables that influence how the mail is fetched. You would normally not need to set or change any of these variables.
mail-source-crash-box
File where mail will be stored while processing it. The default is
‘~/.emacs-mail-crash-box’.
mail-source-delete-incoming
If non-nil
, delete incoming files after handling them. If
t
, delete the files immediately, if nil
, never delete any
files. If a positive number, delete files older than number of days
(the deletion will only happen when receiving new mail). You may also
set mail-source-delete-incoming
to nil
and call
mail-source-delete-old-incoming
from a hook or interactively.
mail-source-delete-incoming
defaults to 10
in alpha Gnusae
and 2
in released Gnusae. See section Gnus Development.
mail-source-delete-old-incoming-confirm
If non-nil
, ask for confirmation before deleting old incoming
files. This variable only applies when
mail-source-delete-incoming
is a positive number.
mail-source-ignore-errors
If non-nil
, ignore errors when reading mail from a mail source.
mail-source-directory
Directory where incoming mail source files (if any) will be stored. The
default is ‘~/Mail/’. At present, the only thing this is used for
is to say where the incoming files will be stored if the variable
mail-source-delete-incoming
is nil
or a number.
mail-source-incoming-file-prefix
Prefix for file name for storing incoming mail. The default is
‘Incoming’, in which case files will end up with names like
‘Incoming30630D_’ or ‘Incoming298602ZD’. This is really only
relevant if mail-source-delete-incoming
is nil
or a
number.
mail-source-default-file-modes
All new mail files will get this file mode. The default is #o600
.
mail-source-movemail-program
If non-nil
, name of program for fetching new mail. If
nil
, movemail
in exec-directory.
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The way to actually tell Gnus where to get new mail from is to set
mail-sources
to a list of mail source specifiers
(see section Mail Source Specifiers).
If this variable is nil
, the mail back ends will never attempt to
fetch mail by themselves.
If you want to fetch mail both from your local spool as well as a POP mail server, you’d say something like:
(setq mail-sources '((file) (pop :server "pop3.mail.server" :password "secret"))) |
Or, if you don’t want to use any of the keyword defaults:
(setq mail-sources '((file :path "/var/spool/mail/user-name") (pop :server "pop3.mail.server" :user "user-name" :port "pop3" :password "secret"))) |
When you use a mail back end, Gnus will slurp all your mail from your inbox and plonk it down in your home directory. Gnus doesn’t move any mail if you’re not using a mail back end—you have to do a lot of magic invocations first. At the time when you have finished drawing the pentagram, lightened the candles, and sacrificed the goat, you really shouldn’t be too surprised when Gnus moves your mail.
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These variables are (for the most part) pertinent to all the various mail back ends.
nnmail-read-incoming-hook
The mail back ends all call this hook after reading new mail. You can use this hook to notify any mail watch programs, if you want to.
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-encoded-words
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 'nnmail-pre-get-new-mail-hook (lambda () (set-default-file-modes #o700))) (add-hook 'nnmail-post-get-new-mail-hook (lambda () (set-default-file-modes #o775))) |
nnmail-use-long-file-names
If non-nil
, the mail back ends will use long file and directory
names. Groups like ‘mail.misc’ will end up in directories
(assuming use of nnml
back end) or files (assuming use of
nnfolder
back end) like ‘mail.misc’. If it is nil
,
the same group will end up in ‘mail/misc’.
nnmail-delete-file-function
Function called to delete files. It is delete-file
by default.
nnmail-cache-accepted-message-ids
If non-nil
, put the Message-ID
s of articles imported into
the back end (via Gcc
, for instance) into the mail duplication
discovery cache. The default is nil
.
nnmail-cache-ignore-groups
This can be a regular expression or a list of regular expressions.
Group names that match any of the regular expressions will never be
recorded in the Message-ID
cache.
This can be useful, for example, when using Fancy Splitting
(see section Fancy Mail Splitting) together with the function
nnmail-split-fancy-with-parent
.
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If the rather simple, standard method for specifying how to split mail
doesn’t allow you to do what you want, you can set
nnmail-split-methods
to nnmail-split-fancy
. Then you can
play with the nnmail-split-fancy
variable.
Let’s look at an example value of this variable first:
;; Messages from the mailer daemon are not crossposted to any of ;; the ordinary groups. Warnings are put in a separate group ;; from real errors. (| ("from" mail (| ("subject" "warn.*" "mail.warning") "mail.misc")) ;; Non-error messages are crossposted to all relevant ;; groups, but we don't crosspost between the group for the ;; (ding) list and the group for other (ding) related mail. (& (| (any "ding@ifi\\.uio\\.no" "ding.list") ("subject" "ding" "ding.misc")) ;; Other mailing lists… (any "procmail@informatik\\.rwth-aachen\\.de" "procmail.list") (any "SmartList@informatik\\.rwth-aachen\\.de" "SmartList.list") ;; Both lists below have the same suffix, so prevent ;; cross-posting to mkpkg.list of messages posted only to ;; the bugs- list, but allow cross-posting when the ;; message was really cross-posted. (any "bugs-mypackage@somewhere" "mypkg.bugs") (any "mypackage@somewhere" - "bugs-mypackage" "mypkg.list") ;; People… (any "larsi@ifi\\.uio\\.no" "people.Lars_Magne_Ingebrigtsen")) ;; Unmatched mail goes to the catch all group. "misc.misc") |
This variable has the format of a split. A split is a (possibly) recursive structure where each split may contain other splits. Here are the possible split syntaxes:
group
If the split is a string, that will be taken as a group name. Normal regexp match expansion will be done. See below for examples.
(field value [- restrict […] ] split [invert-partial])
The split can be a list containing at least three elements. If the first element field (a regexp matching a header) contains value (also a regexp) then store the message as specified by split.
If restrict (yet another regexp) matches some string after field and before the end of the matched value, the split is ignored. If none of the restrict clauses match, split is processed.
The last element invert-partial is optional. If it is
non-nil
, the match-partial-words behavior controlled by the
variable nnmail-split-fancy-match-partial-words
(see below) is
be inverted. (New in Gnus 5.10.7)
(| split …)
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.
(& split …)
If the split is a list, and the first element is &
, then
process all splits in the list.
junk
If the split is the symbol junk
, then don’t save (i.e., delete)
this message. Use with extreme caution.
(: 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.
For instance, the following function could be used to split based on the body of the messages:
(defun split-on-body () (save-excursion (save-restriction (widen) (goto-char (point-min)) (when (re-search-forward "Some.*string" nil t) "string.group")))) |
The buffer is narrowed to the header of the message in question when
function is run. That’s why (widen)
needs to be called
after save-excursion
and save-restriction
in the example
above. Also note that with the nnimap backend, message bodies will
not be downloaded by default. You need to set
nnimap-split-download-body
to t
to do that
(see section Client-Side IMAP Splitting).
(! func split)
If the split is a list, and the first element is !
, then
split will be processed, and func will be called as a
function with the result of split as argument. func
should return a split.
nil
If the split is nil
, it is ignored.
In these splits, field must match a complete field name.
Normally, value in these splits must match a complete word
according to the fundamental mode syntax table. In other words, all
value’s will be implicitly surrounded by \<...\>
markers,
which are word delimiters. Therefore, if you use the following split,
for example,
(any "joe" "joemail") |
messages sent from ‘joedavis@foo.org’ will normally not be filed in ‘joemail’. If you want to alter this behavior, you can use any of the following three ways:
nnmail-split-fancy-match-partial-words
variable
to non-nil
in order to ignore word boundaries and instead the
match becomes more like a grep. This variable controls whether partial
words are matched during fancy splitting. The default value is
nil
.
Note that it influences all value’s in your split rules.
.*
ignores word boundaries in front of
a word. Similarly, if value ends with .*
, word boundaries
in the rear of a word will be ignored. For example, the value
"@example\\.com"
does not match ‘foo@example.com’ but
".*@example\\.com"
does.
nnmail-split-fancy-match-partial-words
is
nil
. Contrarily, if the flag is set, word boundaries are not
ignored even if nnmail-split-fancy-match-partial-words
is
non-nil
. (New in Gnus 5.10.7)
field and value can also be Lisp symbols, in that case
they are expanded as specified by the variable
nnmail-split-abbrev-alist
. This is an alist of cons cells,
where the CAR of a cell contains the key, and the CDR
contains the associated value. Predefined entries in
nnmail-split-abbrev-alist
include:
from
Matches the ‘From’, ‘Sender’ and ‘Resent-From’ fields.
to
Matches the ‘To’, ‘Cc’, ‘Apparently-To’, ‘Resent-To’ and ‘Resent-Cc’ fields.
any
Is the union of the from
and to
entries.
nnmail-split-fancy-syntax-table
is the syntax table in effect
when all this splitting is performed.
If you want to have Gnus create groups dynamically based on some
information in the headers (i.e., do replace-match
-like
substitutions in the group names), you can say things like:
(any "debian-\\b\\(\\w+\\)@lists.debian.org" "mail.debian.\\1") |
In this example, messages sent to ‘debian-foo@lists.debian.org’ will be filed in ‘mail.debian.foo’.
If the string contains the element ‘\\&’, then the previously matched string will be substituted. Similarly, the elements ‘\\1’ up to ‘\\9’ will be substituted with the text matched by the groupings 1 through 9.
Where nnmail-split-lowercase-expanded
controls whether the
lowercase of the matched string should be used for the substitution.
Setting it as non-nil
is useful to avoid the creation of multiple
groups when users send to an address using different case
(i.e., mailing-list@domain vs Mailing-List@Domain). The default value
is t
.
nnmail-split-fancy-with-parent
is a function which allows you to
split followups into the same groups their parents are in. Sometimes
you can’t make splitting rules for all your mail. For example, your
boss might send you personal mail regarding different projects you are
working on, and as you can’t tell your boss to put a distinguishing
string into the subject line, you have to resort to manually moving the
messages into the right group. With this function, you only have to do
it once per thread.
To use this feature, you have to set nnmail-treat-duplicates
and nnmail-cache-accepted-message-ids
to a non-nil
value. And then you can include nnmail-split-fancy-with-parent
using the colon feature, like so:
(setq nnmail-treat-duplicates 'warn ; or |
This feature works as follows: when nnmail-treat-duplicates
is
non-nil
, Gnus records the message id of every message it sees
in the file specified by the variable
nnmail-message-id-cache-file
, together with the group it is in
(the group is omitted for non-mail messages). When mail splitting is
invoked, the function nnmail-split-fancy-with-parent
then looks
at the References (and In-Reply-To) header of each message to split
and searches the file specified by nnmail-message-id-cache-file
for the message ids. When it has found a parent, it returns the
corresponding group name unless the group name matches the regexp
nnmail-split-fancy-with-parent-ignore-groups
. It is
recommended that you set nnmail-message-id-cache-length
to a
somewhat higher number than the default so that the message ids are
still in the cache. (A value of 5000 appears to create a file some
300 kBytes in size.)
When nnmail-cache-accepted-message-ids
is non-nil
, Gnus
also records the message ids of moved articles, so that the followup
messages goes into the new group.
Also see the variable nnmail-cache-ignore-groups
if you don’t
want certain groups to be recorded in the cache. For example, if all
outgoing messages are written to an “outgoing” group, you could set
nnmail-cache-ignore-groups
to match that group name.
Otherwise, answers to all your messages would end up in the
“outgoing” group.
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If you subscribe to dozens of mailing lists but you don’t want to
maintain mail splitting rules manually, group mail splitting is for you.
You just have to set to-list
and/or to-address
in group
parameters or group customization and set nnmail-split-methods
to
gnus-group-split
. This splitting function will scan all groups
for those parameters and split mail accordingly, i.e., messages posted
from or to the addresses specified in the parameters to-list
or
to-address
of a mail group will be stored in that group.
Sometimes, mailing lists have multiple addresses, and you may want mail
splitting to recognize them all: just set the extra-aliases
group
parameter to the list of additional addresses and it’s done. If you’d
rather use a regular expression, set split-regexp
.
All these parameters in a group will be used to create an
nnmail-split-fancy
split, in which the field is ‘any’,
the value is a single regular expression that matches
to-list
, to-address
, all of extra-aliases
and all
matches of split-regexp
, and the split is the name of the
group. restricts are also supported: just set the
split-exclude
parameter to a list of regular expressions.
If you can’t get the right split to be generated using all these
parameters, or you just need something fancier, you can set the
parameter split-spec
to an nnmail-split-fancy
split. In
this case, all other aforementioned parameters will be ignored by
gnus-group-split
. In particular, split-spec
may be set to
nil
, in which case the group will be ignored by
gnus-group-split
.
gnus-group-split
will do cross-posting on all groups that match,
by defining a single &
fancy split containing one split for each
group. If a message doesn’t match any split, it will be stored in the
group named in gnus-group-split-default-catch-all-group
, unless
some group has split-spec
set to catch-all
, in which case
that group is used as the catch-all group. Even though this variable is
often used just to name a group, it may also be set to an arbitrarily
complex fancy split (after all, a group name is a fancy split), and this
may be useful to split mail that doesn’t go to any mailing list to
personal mail folders. Note that this fancy split is added as the last
element of a |
split list that also contains a &
split
with the rules extracted from group parameters.
It’s time for an example. Assume the following group parameters have been defined:
nnml:mail.bar: ((to-address . "bar@femail.com") (split-regexp . ".*@femail\\.com")) nnml:mail.foo: ((to-list . "foo@nowhere.gov") (extra-aliases "foo@localhost" "foo-redist@home") (split-exclude "bugs-foo" "rambling-foo") (admin-address . "foo-request@nowhere.gov")) nnml:mail.others: ((split-spec . catch-all)) |
Setting nnmail-split-methods
to gnus-group-split
will
behave as if nnmail-split-fancy
had been selected and variable
nnmail-split-fancy
had been set as follows:
(| (& (any "\\(bar@femail\\.com\\|.*@femail\\.com\\)" "mail.bar") (any "\\(foo@nowhere\\.gov\\|foo@localhost\\|foo-redist@home\\)" - "bugs-foo" - "rambling-foo" "mail.foo")) "mail.others") |
If you’d rather not use group splitting for all your mail groups, you
may use it for only some of them, by using nnmail-split-fancy
splits like this:
(: gnus-group-split-fancy groups no-crosspost catch-all) |
groups may be a regular expression or a list of group names whose
parameters will be scanned to generate the output split.
no-crosspost can be used to disable cross-posting; in this case, a
single |
split will be output. catch-all is the fall back
fancy split, used like gnus-group-split-default-catch-all-group
.
If catch-all is nil
, or if split-regexp
matches the
empty string in any selected group, no catch-all split will be issued.
Otherwise, if some group has split-spec
set to catch-all
,
this group will override the value of the catch-all argument.
Unfortunately, scanning all groups and their parameters can be quite
slow, especially considering that it has to be done for every message.
But don’t despair! The function gnus-group-split-setup
can be
used to enable gnus-group-split
in a much more efficient way. It
sets nnmail-split-methods
to nnmail-split-fancy
and sets
nnmail-split-fancy
to the split produced by
gnus-group-split-fancy
. Thus, the group parameters are only
scanned once, no matter how many messages are split.
However, if you change group parameters, you’d have to update
nnmail-split-fancy
manually. You can do it by running
gnus-group-split-update
. If you’d rather have it updated
automatically, just tell gnus-group-split-setup
to do it for
you. For example, add to your ‘~/.gnus.el’:
(gnus-group-split-setup auto-update catch-all) |
If auto-update is non-nil
, gnus-group-split-update
will be added to nnmail-pre-get-new-mail-hook
, so you won’t ever
have to worry about updating nnmail-split-fancy
again. If you
don’t omit catch-all (it’s optional, equivalent to nil
),
gnus-group-split-default-catch-all-group
will be set to its
value.
Because you may want to change nnmail-split-fancy
after it is set
by gnus-group-split-update
, this function will run
gnus-group-split-updated-hook
just before finishing.
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Most people have lots of old mail stored in various file formats. If you have set up Gnus to read mail using one of the spiffy Gnus mail back ends, you’ll probably wish to have that old mail incorporated into your mail groups.
Doing so can be quite easy.
To take an example: You’re reading mail using nnml
(see section Mail Spool), and have set nnmail-split-methods
to a
satisfactory value (see section Splitting Mail). You have an old Unix mbox
file filled with important, but old, mail. You want to move it into
your nnml
groups.
Here’s how:
nndoc
group from the mbox file (see section Foreign Groups).
All the mail messages in the mbox file will now also be spread out over
all your nnml
groups. Try entering them and check whether things
have gone without a glitch. If things look ok, you may consider
deleting the mbox file, but I wouldn’t do that unless I was absolutely
sure that all the mail has ended up where it should be.
Respooling is also a handy thing to do if you’re switching from one mail back end to another. Just respool all the mail in the old mail groups using the new mail back end.
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Traditional mail readers have a tendency to remove mail articles when you mark them as read, in some way. Gnus takes a fundamentally different approach to mail reading.
Gnus basically considers mail just to be news that has been received in a rather peculiar manner. It does not think that it has the power to actually change the mail, or delete any mail messages. If you enter a mail group, and mark articles as “read”, or kill them in some other fashion, the mail articles will still exist on the system. I repeat: Gnus will not delete your old, read mail. Unless you ask it to, of course.
To make Gnus get rid of your unwanted mail, you have to mark the articles as expirable. (With the default key bindings, this means that you have to type E.) This does not mean that the articles will disappear right away, however. In general, a mail article will be deleted from your system if, 1) it is marked as expirable, AND 2) it is more than one week old. If you do not mark an article as expirable, it will remain on your system until hell freezes over. This bears repeating one more time, with some spurious capitalizations: IF you do NOT mark articles as EXPIRABLE, Gnus will NEVER delete those ARTICLES.
You do not have to mark articles as expirable by hand. Gnus provides
two features, called “auto-expire” and “total-expire”, that can help you
with this. In a nutshell, “auto-expire” means that Gnus hits E
for you when you select an article. And “total-expire” means that Gnus
considers all articles as expirable that are read. So, in addition to
the articles marked ‘E’, also the articles marked ‘r’,
‘R’, ‘O’, ‘K’, ‘Y’ (and so on) are considered
expirable. gnus-auto-expirable-marks
has the full list of
these marks.
When should either auto-expire or total-expire be used? Most people who are subscribed to mailing lists split each list into its own group and then turn on auto-expire or total-expire for those groups. (See section Splitting Mail, for more information on splitting each list into its own group.)
Which one is better, auto-expire or total-expire? It’s not easy to answer. Generally speaking, auto-expire is probably faster. Another advantage of auto-expire is that you get more marks to work with: for the articles that are supposed to stick around, you can still choose between tick and dormant and read marks. But with total-expire, you only have dormant and ticked to choose from. The advantage of total-expire is that it works well with adaptive scoring (see section Adaptive Scoring). Auto-expire works with normal scoring but not with adaptive scoring.
Groups that match the regular expression
gnus-auto-expirable-newsgroups
will have all articles that you
read marked as expirable automatically. All articles marked as
expirable have an ‘E’ in the first column in the summary buffer.
By default, if you have auto expiry switched on, Gnus will mark all the articles you read as expirable, no matter if they were read or unread before. To avoid having articles marked as read marked as expirable automatically, you can put something like the following in your ‘~/.gnus.el’ file:
(remove-hook 'gnus-mark-article-hook 'gnus-summary-mark-read-and-unread-as-read) (add-hook 'gnus-mark-article-hook 'gnus-summary-mark-unread-as-read) |
Note that making a group auto-expirable doesn’t mean that all read articles are expired—only the articles marked as expirable will be expired. Also note that using the d command won’t make articles expirable—only semi-automatic marking of articles as read will mark the articles as expirable in auto-expirable groups.
Let’s say you subscribe to a couple of mailing lists, and you want the articles you have read to disappear after a while:
(setq gnus-auto-expirable-newsgroups "mail.nonsense-list\\|mail.nice-list") |
Another way to have auto-expiry happen is to have the element
auto-expire
in the group parameters of the group.
If you use adaptive scoring (see section Adaptive Scoring) and auto-expiring, you’ll have problems. Auto-expiring and adaptive scoring don’t really mix very well.
The nnmail-expiry-wait
variable supplies the default time an
expirable article has to live. Gnus starts counting days from when the
message arrived, not from when it was sent. The default is seven
days.
Gnus also supplies a function that lets you fine-tune how long articles are to live, based on what group they are in. Let’s say you want to have one month expiry period in the ‘mail.private’ group, a one day expiry period in the ‘mail.junk’ group, and a six day expiry period everywhere else:
(setq nnmail-expiry-wait-function (lambda (group) (cond ((string= group "mail.private") 31) ((string= group "mail.junk") 1) ((string= group "important") 'never) (t 6)))) |
The group names this function is fed are “unadorned” group names—no ‘nnml:’ prefixes and the like.
The nnmail-expiry-wait
variable and
nnmail-expiry-wait-function
function can either be a number (not
necessarily an integer) or one of the symbols immediate
or
never
.
You can also use the expiry-wait
group parameter to selectively
change the expiry period (see section Group Parameters).
The normal action taken when expiring articles is to delete them.
However, in some circumstances it might make more sense to move them
to other groups instead of deleting them. The variable
nnmail-expiry-target
(and the expiry-target
group
parameter) controls this. The variable supplies a default value for
all groups, which can be overridden for specific groups by the group
parameter. default value is delete
, but this can also be a
string (which should be the name of the group the message should be
moved to), or a function (which will be called in a buffer narrowed to
the message in question, and with the name of the group being moved
from as its parameter) which should return a target—either a group
name or delete
.
Here’s an example for specifying a group name:
(setq nnmail-expiry-target "nnml:expired") |
Gnus provides a function nnmail-fancy-expiry-target
which will
expire mail to groups according to the variable
nnmail-fancy-expiry-targets
. Here’s an example:
(setq nnmail-expiry-target 'nnmail-fancy-expiry-target nnmail-fancy-expiry-targets '((to-from "boss" "nnfolder:Work") ("subject" "IMPORTANT" "nnfolder:IMPORTANT.%Y.%b") ("from" ".*" "nnfolder:Archive-%Y"))) |
With this setup, any mail that has IMPORTANT
in its Subject
header and was sent in the year YYYY
and month MMM
, will
get expired to the group nnfolder:IMPORTANT.YYYY.MMM
. If its
From or To header contains the string boss
, it will get expired
to nnfolder:Work
. All other mail will get expired to
nnfolder:Archive-YYYY
.
If nnmail-keep-last-article
is non-nil
, Gnus will never
expire the final article in a mail newsgroup. This is to make life
easier for procmail users.
By the way: That line up there, about Gnus never expiring non-expirable
articles, is a lie. If you put total-expire
in the group
parameters, articles will not be marked as expirable, but all read
articles will be put through the expiry process. Use with extreme
caution. Even more dangerous is the
gnus-total-expirable-newsgroups
variable. All groups that match
this regexp will have all read articles put through the expiry process,
which means that all old mail articles in the groups in question
will be deleted after a while. Use with extreme caution, and don’t come
crying to me when you discover that the regexp you used matched the
wrong group and all your important mail has disappeared. Be a
man! Or a woman! Whatever you feel more comfortable
with! So there!
Most people make most of their mail groups total-expirable, though.
If gnus-inhibit-user-auto-expire
is non-nil
, user marking
commands will not mark an article as expirable, even if the group has
auto-expire turned on.
The expirable marks of articles will be removed when copying or moving
them to a group in which auto-expire is not turned on. This is for
preventing articles from being expired unintentionally. On the other
hand, to a group that has turned auto-expire on, the expirable marks of
articles that are copied or moved will not be changed by default. I.e.,
when copying or moving to such a group, articles that were expirable
will be left expirable and ones that were not expirable will not be
marked as expirable. So, even though in auto-expire groups, some
articles will never get expired (unless you read them again). If you
don’t side with that behavior that unexpirable articles may be mixed
into auto-expire groups, you can set
gnus-mark-copied-or-moved-articles-as-expirable
to a
non-nil
value. In that case, articles that have been read will
be marked as expirable automatically when being copied or moved to a
group that has auto-expire turned on. The default value is nil
.
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Mailers and list servers are notorious for doing all sorts of really,
really stupid things with mail. “Hey, RFC 822 doesn’t explicitly
prohibit us from adding the string wE aRe ElItE!!!!!1!!
to the
end of all lines passing through our server, so let’s do that!!!!1!”
Yes, but RFC 822 wasn’t designed to be read by morons. Things that were
considered to be self-evident were not discussed. So. Here we are.
Case in point: The German version of Microsoft Exchange adds ‘AW: ’ to the subjects of replies instead of ‘Re: ’. I could pretend to be shocked and dismayed by this, but I haven’t got the energy. It is to laugh.
Gnus provides a plethora of functions for washing articles while displaying them, but it might be nicer to do the filtering before storing the mail to disk. For that purpose, we have three hooks and various functions that can be put in these hooks.
nnmail-prepare-incoming-hook
This hook is called before doing anything with the mail and is meant for grand, sweeping gestures. It is called in a buffer that contains all the new, incoming mail. 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 to make them look nice. Aaah.
(Note that this function works on both the header on the body of all messages, so it is a potentially dangerous function to use (if a body of a message contains something that looks like a header line). So rather than fix the bug, it is of course the right solution to make it into a feature by documenting it.)
nnmail-remove-list-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. nnmail-list-identifiers
may not contain
\\(..\\)
.
For instance, if you want to remove the ‘(idm)’ and the ‘nagnagnag’ identifiers:
(setq nnmail-list-identifiers '("(idm)" "nagnagnag")) |
This can also be done non-destructively with
gnus-list-identifiers
, See section Article Hiding.
nnmail-remove-tabs
Translate all ‘TAB’ characters into ‘SPACE’ characters.
nnmail-ignore-broken-references
Some mail user agents (e.g., Eudora and Pegasus) produce broken
References
headers, but correct In-Reply-To
headers. This
function will get rid of the References
header if the headers
contain a line matching the regular expression
nnmail-broken-references-mailers
.
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.
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If you are a member of a couple of mailing lists, you will sometimes
receive two copies of the same mail. This can be quite annoying, so
nnmail
checks for and treats any duplicates it might find. To do
this, it keeps a cache of old Message-ID
s:
nnmail-message-id-cache-file
, which is ‘~/.nnmail-cache’ by
default. The approximate maximum number of Message-ID
s stored
there is controlled by the nnmail-message-id-cache-length
variable, which is 1000 by default. (So 1000 Message-ID
s will be
stored.) If all this sounds scary to you, you can set
nnmail-treat-duplicates
to warn
(which is what it is by
default), and nnmail
won’t delete duplicate mails. Instead it
will insert a warning into the head of the mail saying that it thinks
that this is a duplicate of a different message.
This variable can also be a function. If that’s the case, the function
will be called from a buffer narrowed to the message in question with
the Message-ID
as a parameter. The function must return either
nil
, warn
, or delete
.
You can turn this feature off completely by setting the variable to
nil
.
If you want all the duplicate mails to be put into a special duplicates group, you could do that using the normal mail split methods:
(setq nnmail-split-fancy '(| ;; Messages duplicates go to a separate group. ("gnus-warning" "duplicat\\(e\\|ion\\) of message" "duplicate") ;; Message from daemons, postmaster, and the like to another. (any mail "mail.misc") ;; Other rules. [...] )) |
Or something like:
(setq nnmail-split-methods
'(("duplicates" "^Gnus-Warning:.*duplicate")
;; Other rules.
[...]))
|
Here’s a neat feature: If you know that the recipient reads her mail
with Gnus, and that she has nnmail-treat-duplicates
set to
delete
, you can send her as many insults as you like, just by
using a Message-ID
of a mail that you know that she’s already
received. Think of all the fun! She’ll never see any of it! Whee!
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If you start using any of the mail back ends, they have the annoying habit of assuming that you want to read mail with them. This might not be unreasonable, but it might not be what you want.
If you set mail-sources
and nnmail-spool-file
to
nil
, none of the back ends will ever attempt to read incoming
mail, which should help.
This might be too much, if, for instance, you are reading mail quite
happily with nnml
and just want to peek at some old (pre-Emacs
23) Rmail file you have stashed away with nnbabyl
. All back ends have
variables called back-end-get-new-mail
. If you want to disable
the nnbabyl
mail reading, you edit the virtual server for the
group to have a setting where nnbabyl-get-new-mail
to nil
.
All the mail back ends will call nn
*-prepare-save-mail-hook
narrowed to the article to be saved before saving it when reading
incoming mail.
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Gnus will read the mail spool when you activate a mail group. The mail file is first copied to your home directory. What happens after that depends on what format you want to store your mail in.
There are six different mail back ends in the standard Gnus, and more
back ends are available separately. The mail back end most people use
(because it is possibly the fastest) is nnml
(see section Mail Spool).
6.4.13.1 Unix Mail Box | Using the (quite) standard Un*x mbox. | |
6.4.13.2 Babyl | Babyl was used by older versions of Rmail. | |
6.4.13.3 Mail Spool | Store your mail in a private spool? | |
6.4.13.4 MH Spool | An mhspool-like back end. | |
6.4.13.5 Maildir | Another one-file-per-message format. | |
6.4.13.6 Group parameters | ||
6.4.13.7 Article identification | ||
6.4.13.8 NOV data | ||
6.4.13.9 Article marks | ||
6.4.13.10 Mail Folders | Having one file for each group. | |
6.4.13.11 Comparing Mail Back Ends | An in-depth looks at pros and cons. |
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The nnmbox back end will use the standard Un*x mbox file to store
mail. nnmbox
will add extra headers to each mail article to say
which group it belongs in.
Virtual server settings:
nnmbox-mbox-file
The name of the mail box in the user’s home directory. Default is ‘~/mbox’.
nnmbox-active-file
The name of the active file for the mail box. Default is ‘~/.mbox-active’.
nnmbox-get-new-mail
If non-nil
, nnmbox
will read incoming mail and split it
into groups. Default is t
.
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The nnbabyl back end will use a Babyl mail box 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 Babyl file. The default is ‘~/RMAIL’
nnbabyl-active-file
The name of the active file for the Babyl file. The default is ‘~/.rmail-active’
nnbabyl-get-new-mail
If non-nil
, nnbabyl
will read incoming mail. Default is
t
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The nnml spool mail format isn’t compatible with any other known format. It should be used with some caution.
If you use this back end, Gnus will split all incoming mail into files,
one file for each mail, and put the articles into the corresponding
directories under the directory specified by the nnml-directory
variable. The default value is ‘~/Mail/’.
You do not have to create any directories beforehand; Gnus will take care of all that.
If you have a strict limit as to how many files you are allowed to store in your account, you should not use this back end. As each mail gets its own file, you might very well occupy thousands of inodes within a few weeks. If this is no problem for you, and it isn’t a problem for you having your friendly systems administrator walking around, madly, shouting “Who is eating all my inodes?! Who? Who!?!”, then you should know that this is probably the fastest format to use. You do not have to trudge through a big mbox file just to read your new mail.
nnml
is probably the slowest back end when it comes to article
splitting. It has to create lots of files, and it also generates
NOV databases for the incoming mails. This makes it possibly the
fastest back end when it comes to reading mail.
Virtual server settings:
nnml-directory
All nnml
directories will be placed under this directory. The
default is the value of message-directory
(whose default value
is ‘~/Mail’).
nnml-active-file
The active file for the nnml
server. The default is
‘~/Mail/active’.
nnml-newsgroups-file
The nnml
group descriptions file. See section Newsgroups File Format. The default is ‘~/Mail/newsgroups’.
nnml-get-new-mail
If non-nil
, nnml
will read incoming mail. The default is
t
.
nnml-nov-is-evil
If non-nil
, this back end will ignore any NOV files. The
default is nil
.
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.
nnml-use-compressed-files
If non-nil
, nnml
will allow using compressed message
files. This requires auto-compression-mode
to be enabled
(see (emacs)Compressed Files section ‘Compressed Files’ in The Emacs Manual).
If the value of nnml-use-compressed-files
is a string, it is used
as the file extension specifying the compression program. You can set it
to ‘.bz2’ if your Emacs supports