This is gnus, produced by makeinfo version 4.5 from gnus.texi. INFO-DIR-SECTION Emacs START-INFO-DIR-ENTRY * Gnus: (gnus). The newsreader Gnus. END-INFO-DIR-ENTRY This file documents Gnus, the GNU Emacs newsreader. Copyright (C) 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003 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 1.1 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with the Invariant Sections being none, 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" in the Emacs manual. (a) The FSF's Back-Cover Text is: "You have freedom to copy and modify this GNU Manual, like GNU software. Copies published by the Free Software Foundation raise funds for GNU development." This document is part of a collection distributed under the GNU Free Documentation License. If you want to distribute this document separately from the collection, you can do so by adding a copy of the license to the document, as described in section 6 of the license.  File: gnus, Node: [5.8], Next: [5.9], Prev: [5.7], Up: FAQ 5 - Composing messages Question 5.8: ............. Sometimes I see little images at the top of article buffer. What's that and how can I send one with my postings, too? Answer: Those images are called X-Faces. They are 48*48 pixel b/w pictures, encoded in a header line. If you want to include one in your posts, you've got to convert some image to a X-Face. So fire up some image manipulation program (say Gimp), open the image you want to include, cut out the relevant part, reduce color depth to 1 bit, resize to 48*48 and save as bitmap. Now you should get the compface package from this site (ftp://ftp.cs.indiana.edu:/pub/faces/). and create the actual X-face by saying cat file.xbm | xbm2ikon |compface > file.face cat ./file.face | sed 's/\\/\\\\/g' | sed 's/\"/\\\"/g' > ./file.face.quoted If you can't use compface, there's an online X-face converter at `http://www.dairiki.org/xface/'. If you use MS Windows, you could also use the WinFace program from `http://www.xs4all.nl/~walterln/winface/'. Now you only have to tell Gnus to include the X-face in your postings by saying (setq message-default-headers (with-temp-buffer (insert "X-Face: ") (insert-file-contents "~/.xemacs/xface") (buffer-string))) in ~/.gnus.  File: gnus, Node: [5.9], Next: [5.10], Prev: [5.8], Up: FAQ 5 - Composing messages Question 5.9: ............. Sometimes I accidentally hit r instead of f in newsgroups. Can Gnus warn me, when I'm replying by mail in newsgroups? Answer: Put this in ~/.gnus: (setq gnus-confirm-mail-reply-to-news t) if you already use Gnus 5.10.0, if you still use 5.8.8 or 5.9 try this instead: (defadvice gnus-summary-reply (around reply-in-news activate) (interactive) (when (or (not (gnus-news-group-p gnus-newsgroup-name)) (y-or-n-p "Really reply? ")) ad-do-it))  File: gnus, Node: [5.10], Next: [5.11], Prev: [5.9], Up: FAQ 5 - Composing messages Question 5.10: .............. How to tell Gnus not to generate a sender header? Answer: Since 5.10.0 Gnus doesn't generate a sender header by default. For older Gnus' try this in ~/.gnus: (eval-after-load "message" '(add-to-list 'message-syntax-checks '(sender . disabled)))  File: gnus, Node: [5.11], Next: [5.12], Prev: [5.10], Up: FAQ 5 - Composing messages Question 5.11: .............. I want gnus to locally store copies of my send mail and news, how to do it? Answer: You must set the variable gnus-message-archive-group to do this. You can set it to a string giving the name of the group where the copies shall go or like in the example below use a function which is evaluated and which returns the group to use. (setq gnus-message-archive-group '((if (message-news-p) "nnml:Send-News" "nnml:Send-Mail")))  File: gnus, Node: [5.12], Prev: [5.11], Up: FAQ 5 - Composing messages Question 5.12: .............. People tell me my Message-IDs are not correct, why aren't they and how to fix it? Answer: The message-ID is an unique identifier for messages you send. To make it unique, Gnus need to know which machine name to put after the "@". If the name of the machine where Gnus is running isn't suitable (it probably isn't at most private machines) you can tell Gnus what to use by saying (setq message-user-fqdn "yourmachine.yourdomain.tld") in ~/.gnus. If you use Gnus 5.9 or ealier, you can use this instead: (eval-after-load "message" '(let (myfqdn "yourmachine.yourdomain.tld");; <-- Edit this! (if (boundp 'message-user-fqdn) (setq message-user-fqdn fqdn) (gnus-message 1 "Redefining `message-make-fqdn'.") (defun message-make-fqdn () "Return user's fully qualified domain name." fqdn)))) If you have no idea what to insert for "yourmachine.yourdomain.tld", you've got several choices. You can either ask your provider if he allows you to use something like yourUserName.userfqdn.provider.net, or you can use somethingUnique.yourdomain.tld if you own the domain yourdomain.tld, or you can register at a service which gives private users a FQDN for free, e.g. `http://www.stura.tu-freiberg.de/~dlx/addfqdn.html'. (Sorry but this website is in German, if you know of an English one offering the same, drop me a note). Finally you can tell Gnus not to generate a Message-ID for News at all (and letting the server do the job) by saying (setq message-required-news-headers (remove' Message-ID message-required-news-headers)) you can also tell Gnus not to generate Message-IDs for mail by saying (setq message-required-mail-headers (remove' Message-ID message-required-mail-headers)) , however some mail servers don't generate proper Message-IDs, too, so test if your Mail Server behaves correctly by sending yourself a Mail and looking at the Message-ID.  File: gnus, Node: FAQ 6 - Old messages, Next: FAQ 7 - Gnus in a dial-up environment, Prev: FAQ 5 - Composing messages, Up: Frequently Asked Questions Old messages ------------ * Menu: * [6.1]:: How to import my old mail into Gnus? * [6.2]:: How to archive interesting messages? * [6.3]:: How to search for a specific message? * [6.4]:: How to get rid of old unwanted mail? * [6.5]:: I want that all read messages are expired (at least in some groups). How to do it? * [6.6]:: I don't want expiration to delete my mails but to move them to another group.  File: gnus, Node: [6.1], Next: [6.2], Prev: FAQ 6 - Old messages, Up: FAQ 6 - Old messages Question 6.1: ............. How to import my old mail into Gnus? Answer: The easiest way is to tell your old mail program to export the messages in mbox format. Most Unix mailers are able to do this, if you come from the MS Windows world, you may find tools at `http://mbx2mbox.sourceforge.net/'. Now you've got to import this mbox file into Gnus. To do this, create a nndoc group based on the mbox file by saying `G f /path/file.mbox RET' in Group buffer. You now have read-only access to your mail. If you want to import the messages to your normal Gnus mail groups hierarchy, enter the nndoc group you've just created by saying `C-u RET' (thus making sure all messages are retrieved), mark all messages by saying `M P b' and either copy them to the desired group by saying `B c name.of.group RET' or send them through nnmail-split-methods (respool them) by saying `B r'.  File: gnus, Node: [6.2], Next: [6.3], Prev: [6.1], Up: FAQ 6 - Old messages Question 6.2: ............. How to archive interesting messages? Answer: If you stumble across an interesting message, say in gnu.emacs.gnus and want to archive it there are several solutions. The first and easiest is to save it to a file by saying `O f'. However, wouldn't it be much more convenient to have more direct access to the archived message from Gnus? If you say yes, put this snippet by Frank Haun in ~/.gnus: (defun my-archive-article (&optional n) "Copies one or more article(s) to a corresponding `nnml:' group, e.g. `gnus.ding' goes to `nnml:1.gnus.ding'. And `nnml:List-gnus.ding' goes to `nnml:1.List-gnus-ding'. Use process marks or mark a region in the summary buffer to archive more then one article." (interactive "P") (let ((archive-name (format "nnml:1.%s" (if (featurep 'xemacs) (replace-in-string gnus-newsgroup-name "^.*:" "") (replace-regexp-in-string "^.*:" "" gnus-newsgroup-name))))) (gnus-summary-copy-article n archive-name))) You can now say `M-x my-archive-article' in summary buffer to archive the article under the cursor in a nnml group. (Change nnml to your preferred back end) Of course you can also make sure the cache is enabled by saying (setq gnus-use-cache t) then you only have to set either the tick or the dormant mark for articles you want to keep, setting the read mark will remove them from cache.  File: gnus, Node: [6.3], Next: [6.4], Prev: [6.2], Up: FAQ 6 - Old messages Question 6.3: ............. How to search for a specific message? Answer: There are several ways for this, too. For a posting from a Usenet group the easiest solution is probably to ask groups.google.com (http://groups.google.com), if you found the posting there, tell Google to display the raw message, look for the message-id, and say `M-^ the@message.id RET' in a summary buffer. Since Gnus 5.10.0 there's also a Gnus interface for groups.google.com which you can call with `G W') in group buffer. Another idea which works for both mail and news groups is to enter the group where the message you are searching is and use the standard Emacs search `C-s', it's smart enough to look at articles in collapsed threads, too. If you want to search bodies, too try `M-s' instead. Further on there are the gnus-summary-limit-to-foo functions, which can help you, too. Of course you can also use grep to search through your local mail, but this is both slow for big archives and inconvenient since you are not displaying the found mail in Gnus. Here comes nnir into action. Nnir is a front end to search engines like swish-e or swish++ and others. You index your mail with one of those search engines and with the help of nnir you can search trough the indexed mail and generate a temporary group with all messages which met your search criteria. If this sound cool to you get nnir.el from `ftp://ls6-ftp.cs.uni-dortmund.de/pub/src/emacs/' or `ftp://ftp.is.informatik.uni-duisburg.de/pub/src/emacs/'. Instructions on how to use it are at the top of the file.  File: gnus, Node: [6.4], Next: [6.5], Prev: [6.3], Up: FAQ 6 - Old messages Question 6.4: ............. How to get rid of old unwanted mail? Answer: You can of course just mark the mail you don't need anymore by saying `#' with point over the mail and then say `B DEL' to get rid of them forever. You could also instead of actually deleting them, send them to a junk-group by saying `B m nnml:trash-bin' which you clear from time to time, but both are not the intended way in Gnus. In Gnus, we let mail expire like news expires on a news server. That means you tell Gnus the message is expirable (you tell Gnus "I don't need this mail anymore") by saying `E' with point over the mail in summary buffer. Now when you leave the group, Gnus looks at all messages which you marked as expirable before and if they are old enough (default is older than a week) they are deleted.  File: gnus, Node: [6.5], Next: [6.6], Prev: [6.4], Up: FAQ 6 - Old messages Question 6.5: ............. I want that all read messages are expired (at least in some groups). How to do it? Answer: If you want all read messages to be expired (e.g. in mailing lists where there's an online archive), you've got two choices: auto-expire and total-expire. Auto-expire means, that every article which has no marks set and is selected for reading is marked as expirable, Gnus hits `E' for you every time you read a message. Total-expire follows a slightly different approach, here all article where the read mark is set are expirable. To activate auto-expire, include auto-expire in the Group parameters for the group. (Hit `G c' in summary buffer with point over the group to change group parameters). For total-expire add total-expire to the group-parameters. Which method you choose is merely a matter of taste: Auto-expire is faster, but it doesn't play together with Adaptive Scoring, so if you want to use this feature, you should use total-expire. If you want a message to be excluded from expiration in a group where total or auto expire is active, set either tick (hit `u') or dormant mark (hit `u'), when you use auto-expire, you can also set the read mark (hit `d').  File: gnus, Node: [6.6], Prev: [6.5], Up: FAQ 6 - Old messages Question 6.6: ............. I don't want expiration to delete my mails but to move them to another group. Answer: Say something like this in ~/.gnus: (setq nnmail-expiry-target "nnml:expired") (If you want to change the value of nnmail-expiry-target on a per group basis see the question "How can I disable threading in some (e.g. mail-) groups, or set other variables specific for some groups?")  File: gnus, Node: FAQ 7 - Gnus in a dial-up environment, Next: FAQ 8 - Getting help, Prev: FAQ 6 - Old messages, Up: Frequently Asked Questions Gnus in a dial-up environment ----------------------------- * Menu: * [7.1]:: I don't have a permanent connection to the net, how can I minimize the time I've got to be connected? * [7.2]:: So what was this thing about the Agent? * [7.3]:: I want to store article bodies on disk, too. How to do it? * [7.4]:: How to tell Gnus not to try to send mails / postings while I'm offline?  File: gnus, Node: [7.1], Next: [7.2], Prev: FAQ 7 - Gnus in a dial-up environment, Up: FAQ 7 - Gnus in a dial-up environment Question 7.1: ............. I don't have a permanent connection to the net, how can I minimize the time I've got to be connected? Answer: You've got basically two options: Either you use the Gnus Agent (see below) for this, or you can install programs which fetch your news and mail to your local disk and Gnus reads the stuff from your local machine. If you want to follow the second approach, you need a program which fetches news and offers them to Gnus, a program which does the same for mail and a program which receives the mail you write from Gnus and sends them when you're online. Let's talk about Unix systems first: For the news part, the easiest solution is a small nntp server like Leafnode (http://www.leafnode.org/) or sn (http://infa.abo.fi/~patrik/sn/), of course you can also install a full featured news server like inn (http://www.isc.org/products/INN/). Then you want to fetch your Mail, popular choices are * fetchmail (http://www.catb.org/~esr/fetchmail/) and * getmail (http://www.qcc.ca/~charlesc/software/getmail-3.0/). You should tell those to write the mail to your disk and Gnus to read it from there. Last but not least the mail sending part: This can be done with every MTA like sendmail (http://www.sendmail.org/), postfix (http://www.qmail.org/), exim (http://www.exim.org/) or qmail (http://www.qmail.org/). On windows boxes I'd vote for Hamster (http://www.tglsoft.de/), it's a small freeware, open-source program which fetches your mail and news from remote servers and offers them to Gnus (or any other mail and/or news reader) via nntp respectively POP3 or IMAP. It also includes a smtp server for receiving mails from Gnus.  File: gnus, Node: [7.2], Next: [7.3], Prev: [7.1], Up: FAQ 7 - Gnus in a dial-up environment Question 7.2: ............. So what was this thing about the Agent? Answer: The Gnus agent is part of Gnus, it allows you to fetch mail and news and store them on disk for reading them later when you're offline. It kind of mimics offline newsreaders like e.g. Forte Agent. If you want to use the Agent place the following in ~/.gnus if you are still using 5.8.8 or 5.9 (it's the default since 5.10.0): (setq gnus-agent t) Now you've got to select the servers whose groups can be stored locally. To do this, open the server buffer (that is press `^' while in the group buffer). Now select a server by moving point to the line naming that server. Finally, agentize the server by typing `J a'. If you make a mistake, or change your mind, you can undo this action by typing `J r'. When you're done, type 'q' to return to the group buffer. Now the next time you enter a group on a agentized server, the headers will be stored on disk and read from there the next time you enter the group.  File: gnus, Node: [7.3], Next: [7.4], Prev: [7.2], Up: FAQ 7 - Gnus in a dial-up environment Question 7.3: ............. I want to store article bodies on disk, too. How to do it? Answer: You can tell the agent to automatically fetch the bodies of articles which fulfill certain predicates, this is done in a special buffer which can be reached by saying `J c' in group buffer. Please refer to the documentation for information which predicates are possible and how exactly to do it. Further on you can tell the agent manually which articles to store on disk. There are two ways to do this: Number one: In the summary buffer, process mark a set of articles that shall be stored in the agent by saying `#' with point over the article and then type `J s'. The other possibility is to set, again in the summary buffer, downloadable (%) marks for the articles you want by typing `@' with point over the article and then typing `J u'. What's the difference? Well, process marks are erased as soon as you exit the summary buffer while downloadable marks are permanent. You can actually set downloadable marks in several groups then use fetch session ('J s' in the GROUP buffer) to fetch all of those articles. The only downside is that fetch session also fetches all of the headers for every selected group on an agentized server. Depending on the volume of headers, the initial fetch session could take hours.  File: gnus, Node: [7.4], Prev: [7.3], Up: FAQ 7 - Gnus in a dial-up environment Question 7.4: ............. How to tell Gnus not to try to send mails / postings while I'm offline? Answer: All you've got to do is to tell Gnus when you are online (plugged) and when you are offline (unplugged), the rest works automatically. You can toggle plugged/unplugged state by saying `J j' in group buffer. To start Gnus unplugged say `M-x gnus-unplugged' instead of `M-x gnus'. Note that for this to work, the agent must be active.  File: gnus, Node: FAQ 8 - Getting help, Next: FAQ 9 - Tuning Gnus, Prev: FAQ 7 - Gnus in a dial-up environment, Up: Frequently Asked Questions Getting help ------------ * Menu: * [8.1]:: How to find information and help inside Emacs? * [8.2]:: I can't find anything in the Gnus manual about X (e.g. attachments, PGP, MIME...), is it not documented? * [8.3]:: Which websites should I know? * [8.4]:: Which mailing lists and newsgroups are there? * [8.5]:: Where to report bugs? * [8.6]:: I need real-time help, where to find it?  File: gnus, Node: [8.1], Next: [8.2], Prev: FAQ 8 - Getting help, Up: FAQ 8 - Getting help Question 8.1: ............. How to find information and help inside Emacs? Answer: The first stop should be the Gnus manual (Say `C-h i d m Gnus RET' to start the Gnus manual, then walk through the menus or do a full-text search with `s'). Then there are the general Emacs help commands starting with C-h, type `C-h ? ?' to get a list of all available help commands and their meaning. Finally `M-x apropos-command' lets you search through all available functions and `M-x apropos' searches the bound variables.  File: gnus, Node: [8.2], Next: [8.3], Prev: [8.1], Up: FAQ 8 - Getting help Question 8.2: ............. I can't find anything in the Gnus manual about X (e.g. attachments, PGP, MIME...), is it not documented? Answer: There's not only the Gnus manual but also the manuals for message, emacs-mime, sieve and pgg. Those packages are distributed with Gnus and used by Gnus but aren't really part of core Gnus, so they are documented in different info files, you should have a look in those manuals, too.  File: gnus, Node: [8.3], Next: [8.4], Prev: [8.2], Up: FAQ 8 - Getting help Question 8.3: ............. Which websites should I know? Answer: The two most important ones are the official Gnus website (http://www.gnus.org). and it's sister site my.gnus.org (MGO) (http://my.gnus.org), hosting an archive of lisp snippets, howtos, a (not really finished) tutorial and this FAQ. Tell me about other sites which are interesting.  File: gnus, Node: [8.4], Next: [8.5], Prev: [8.3], Up: FAQ 8 - Getting help Question 8.4: ............. Which mailing lists and newsgroups are there? Answer: There's the newsgroup gnu.emacs.gnus (pull it from e.g. news.gnus.org) which deals with general questions and the ding mailing list (ding@gnus.org) dealing with development of Gnus. You can read the ding list via NNTP, too under the name gnus.ding from news.gnus.org. If you want to stay in the big8, news.software.newssreaders is also read by some Gnus users (but chances for qualified help are much better in the above groups) and if you speak German, there's de.comm.software.gnus.  File: gnus, Node: [8.5], Next: [8.6], Prev: [8.4], Up: FAQ 8 - Getting help Question 8.5: ............. Where to report bugs? Answer: Say `M-x gnus-bug', this will start a message to the gnus bug mailing list including information about your environment which make it easier to help you.  File: gnus, Node: [8.6], Prev: [8.5], Up: FAQ 8 - Getting help Question 8.6: ............. I need real-time help, where to find it? Answer: Point your IRC client to irc.my.gnus.org channel #mygnus. Don't be afraid if people there speak German, they are willing and capable of switching to English when people from outside Germany enter.  File: gnus, Node: FAQ 9 - Tuning Gnus, Next: FAQ - Glossary, Prev: FAQ 8 - Getting help, Up: Frequently Asked Questions Tuning Gnus ----------- * Menu: * [9.1]:: Starting Gnus is really slow, how to speed it up? * [9.2]:: How to speed up the process of entering a group? * [9.3]:: Sending mail becomes slower and slower, what's up?  File: gnus, Node: [9.1], Next: [9.2], Prev: FAQ 9 - Tuning Gnus, Up: FAQ 9 - Tuning Gnus Question 9.1: ............. Starting Gnus is really slow, how to speed it up? Answer: The reason for this could be the way Gnus reads it's active file, see the node "The Active File" in the Gnus manual for things you might try to speed the process up. An other idea would be to byte compile your ~/.gnus (say `M-x byte-compile-file RET ~/.gnus RET' to do it). Finally, if you have require statements in your .gnus, you could replace them with eval-after-load, which loads the stuff not at startup time, but when it's needed. Say you've got this in your ~/.gnus: (require 'message) (add-to-list 'message-syntax-checks '(sender . disabled)) then as soon as you start Gnus, message.el is loaded. If you replace it with (eval-after-load "message" '(add-to-list 'message-syntax-checks '(sender . disabled))) it's loaded when it's needed.  File: gnus, Node: [9.2], Next: [9.3], Prev: [9.1], Up: FAQ 9 - Tuning Gnus Question 9.2: ............. How to speed up the process of entering a group? Answer: A speed killer is setting the variable gnus-fetch-old-headers to anything different from nil, so don't do this if speed is an issue. To speed up building of summary say (gnus-compile) at the bottom of your ~/.gnus, this will make gnus byte-compile things like gnus-summary-line-format. then you could increase the value of gc-cons-threshold by saying something like (setq gc-cons-threshold 3500000) in ~/.emacs. If you don't care about width of CJK characters or use Gnus 5.10.0 or younger together with a recent GNU Emacs, you should say (setq gnus-use-correct-string-widths nil) in ~/.gnus (thanks to Jesper harder for the last two suggestions). Finally if you are still using 5.8.8 or 5.9 and experience speed problems with summary buffer generation, you definitely should update to 5.10.0 since there quite some work on improving it has been done.  File: gnus, Node: [9.3], Prev: [9.2], Up: FAQ 9 - Tuning Gnus Question 9.3: ............. Sending mail becomes slower and slower, what's up? Answer: The reason could be that you told Gnus to archive the messages you wrote by setting gnus-message-archive-group. Try to use a nnml group instead of an archive group, this should bring you back to normal speed.  File: gnus, Node: FAQ - Glossary, Prev: FAQ 9 - Tuning Gnus, Up: Frequently Asked Questions Glossary -------- "~/.gnus" When the term ~/.gnus is used it just means your Gnus configuration file. You might as well call it ~/.gnus.el or specify another name. "Back End" In Gnus terminology a back end is a virtual server, a layer between core Gnus and the real NNTP-, POP3-, IMAP- or whatever-server which offers Gnus a standardized interface to functions like "get message", "get Headers" etc. "Emacs" When the term Emacs is used in this FAQ, it means either GNU Emacs or XEmacs. "Message" In this FAQ message means a either a mail or a posting to a Usenet Newsgroup or to some other fancy back end, no matter of which kind it is. "MUA" MUA is an acronym for Mail User Agent, it's the program you use to read and write e-mails. "NUA" NUA is an acronym for News User Agent, it's the program you use to read and write Usenet news.