Hello

Here's the second draft for the new Gnus FAQ, you can find a list of
changes at the top of the document. As always you can find this document
at http://my.gnus.org/FAQ (Who's computer is this?) in various formats.

Suggestion, comments etc are highly welcome.

Here we go:
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Frequently Asked Questions

$Id: gnus-faq.xml,v 1.14 2003/01/08 23:14:32 fschmitt Exp $

Copyright © 1995, 1996 Free Software Foundation.

Copyright © 1995, 2001 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

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Table of Contents

Changes
Introduction
Frequently Asked Questions with Answers
Glossary

Abstract

This is the new Gnus Frequently Asked Questions list. If you have a
Web browser, the official hypertext version is at http:// (Who's computer is this?)
my.gnus.org/FAQ/ [http://my.gnus.org/FAQ/ (Who's computer is this?) ], the Docbook source is
available from http://sourceforge.net (Who's computer is this?) [http://sourceforge.net/ (Who's computer is this?)
projects/gnus/].

Please submit features and suggestions to the FAQ discussion list
[mailto:faq-discuss@my.gnus.org]. The list is protected against
junk mail with qconfirm [http://smarden.org/qconfirm/index.html (Who's computer is this?) ].
As a subscriber, your submissions will automatically pass. You can
also subscribe to the list by sending a blank email to
faq-discuss-subscribe@my.gnus.org
[mailto:faq-discuss-subscribe@my.gnus.org] and browse the archive.

Changes

This file is $Id: gnus-faq.xml,v 1.14 2003/01/08 23:14:32 fschmitt
Exp $.

* Changed instructions on where to find ~/.gnus under MS Windows
(suggested by Kai Gro"sohann and Reiner Steib)

* It's GNU not Gnu (suggested by Reiner Steib)

* Fixed numerous spelling errors (pointed out by Jesper Harder,
Kai Gro"sohann, Don Saklad and Reiner Steib)

* New question and answer dealing with generation of Message-IDs

* Set nnspool-spool-directory as server parameter, use
add-to-list not setq when setting
"mm-discouraged-alternatives", mention how to use the cache for
archiving articles, mention mirror for nnir.el, better
explanation for auto-expire, go to top node of info before
entering Gnus manual (all suggested by Kai Gro"sohann)

* Better my-archive-article, author is Frank Haun.

* Mention mail aliases as alternative to bbdb (Suggested by
Kester Clegg and Reiner Steib)

* Use "/" in Windows paths, too. Use "M P b" instead of "M P a",
and "G c" instead of "G p" to customize groups, many smaller
corrections (suggested by Reiner Steib)

* New mailinglist for discussing this FAQ:
faq-discuss@my.gnus.org

Introduction

This is the Gnus Frequently Asked Questions list.

Gnus is a Usenet Newsreader and Electronic Mail User Agent
implemented as a part of Emacs. It's been around in some form for
almost a decade now, and has been distributed as a standard part of
Emacs for much of that time. Gnus 5 is the latest (and greatest)
incarnation. The original version was called GNUS, and was written
by Masanobu UMEDA. When autumn crept up in '94, Lars Magne
Ingebrigtsen grew bored and decided to rewrite Gnus.

Its biggest strength is the fact that it is extremely customizable.
It is somewhat intimidating at first glance, but most of the
complexity can be ignored until you're ready to take advantage of
it. If you receive a reasonable volume of e-mail (you're on various
mailing lists), or you would like to read high-volume mailing lists
but cannot keep up with them, or read high volume newsgroups or are
just bored, then Gnus is what you want.

This FAQ was maintained by Justin Sheehy until March 2002. He would
like to thank Steve Baur and Per Abrahamsen for doing a wonderful
job with this FAQ before him. We would like to do the same -
thanks, Justin!

If you have a Web browser, the official hypertext version is at:
http://my.gnus.org/FAQ/ (Who's computer is this?) [http://my.gnus.org/FAQ/ (Who's computer is this?) ]. This version is
much nicer than the unofficial hypertext versions that are archived
at Utrecht, Oxford, Smart Pages, Ohio State, and other FAQ
archives. See the resources question below if you want information
on obtaining it in another format.

The information contained here was compiled with the assistance of
the Gnus development mailing list, and any errors or misprints are
the my.gnus.org team's fault, sorry.

Frequently Asked Questions with Answers

1. Installation FAQ

1.1. What is the latest version of Gnus?
1.2. Where and how to get Gnus?
1.3. What to do with the tarball now?
1.4. Which version of Emacs do I need?
1.5. How do I run Gnus on both Emacs and XEmacs?

2. Getting Messages

2.1. I just installed Gnus, started it via M-x gnus but it only
says "nntp (news) open error", what to do?
2.2. I'm working under Windows and have no idea what ~/.gnus
means.
2.3. My Newsserver requires authentification, how to store user
name and password on disk?
2.4. Gnus seems to start up OK, but I can't find out how to
subscribe to a group.
2.5. Gnus doesn't show all groups / Gnus says I'm not allowed
to post on this server as well as I am, what's that?
2.6. I want Gnus to fetch news from several servers, is this
possible?
2.7. And how about local spool files?
2.8. OK, reading news works now, but I want to be able to read
my mail with Gnus, too. How to do it?
2.9. And what about IMAP?
2.10. At the office we use one of those MS Exchange servers,
can I use Gnus to read my mail from it?
2.11. Can I tell Gnus not to delete the mails on the server it
retrieves via POP3?

3. Reading messages

3.1. When I enter a group, all read messages are gone. How to
view them again?
3.2. How to tell Gnus to show an important message every time I
enter a group, even when it's read?
3.3. How to view the headers of a message?
3.4. How to view the raw unformatted message?
3.5. How can I change the headers Gnus displays by default at
the top of the article buffer?
3.6. I'd like Gnus NOT to render HTML-mails but show me the
text part if it's available. How to do it?
3.7. Can I use some other browser than w3 to render my
HTML-mails?
3.8. Is there anything I can do to make poorly formatted mails
more readable?
3.9. Is there a way to automatically ignore posts by specific
authors or with specific words in the subject? And can I
highlight more interesting ones in some way?
3.10. How can I disable threading in some (e.g. mail-) groups,
or set other variables specific for some groups?
3.11. Can I highlight messages written by me and follow-ups to
those?
3.12. The number of total messages in a group which Gnus
displays in group buffer is by far to high, especially in
mail groups. Is this a bug?
3.13. I don't like the layout of summary and article buffer,
how to change it? Perhaps even a three pane display?
3.14. I don't like the way the Summary buffer looks, how to
tweak it?
3.15. How to split incoming mails in several groups?

4. Composing messages

4.1. What are the basic commands I need to know for sending
mail and postings?
4.2. How to enable automatic word-wrap when composing messages?
4.3. How to set stuff like From, Organization, Reply-To,
signature...?
4.4. Can I set things like From, Signature etc group based on
the group I post too?
4.5. Is there a spell-checker? Perhaps even on-the-fly
spell-checking?
4.6. Can I set the dictionary based on the group I'm posting
to?
4.7. Is there some kind of address-book, so I needn't remember
all those email addresses?
4.8. Sometimes I see little images at the top of article
buffer. What's that and how can I send one with my
postings, too?
4.9. Sometimes I accidentally hit r instead of f in newsgroups.
Can Gnus warn me, when I'm replying by mail in newsgroups?
4.10. How to tell Gnus not to generate a sender header?
4.11. I want gnus to locally store copies of my send mail and
news, how to do it?
4.12. People tell me my Message-IDs are not correct, why aren't
they and how to fix it?

5. Old messages

5.1. How to import my old mail into Gnus?
5.2. How to archive interesting messages?
5.3. How to search for a specific message?
5.4. How to get rid of old unwanted mail?
5.5. I want that all read messages are expired (at least in
some groups). How to do it?
5.6. I don't want expiration to delete my mails but to move
them to another group.

6. Getting help

6.1. How to find information and help inside Emacs?
6.2. I can't find anything in the Gnus manual about X (e.g.
attachments, PGP, MIME...), is it not documented?
6.3. Which websites should I know?
6.4. Which mailing lists and newsgroups are there?
6.5. Where to report bugs?
6.6. I need real-time help, where to find it?

7. Tuning Gnus

7.1. Starting Gnus is really slow, how to speed it up?
7.2. How to speed up the process of entering a group?
7.3. Sending mail becomes slower and slower, what's up?

1. Installation FAQ

1.1. What is the latest version of Gnus?

As of this posting, the latest Gnus version is 5.8.8(which is
basically the same as Gnus 5.9 which is shipped with GNU Emacs).
This version is very stable and should be the choice for all
beginners. However 5.8.8 is quite old, so many people today use the
BETA version from CVS called Oort Gnus, which contains a huge
amount of new features. If you want to do this too, be aware that
it's beta and might have bugs and at worst case might eat your
mail.

1.2. Where and how to get Gnus?

The latest released version of Gnus is included in Emacs 21 and
available through the package system of XEmacs 21.4, so the easiest
way is getting one of those. If you don't want or can't do this,
get the Gnus tarball from http://www.gnus.org/dist/gnus.tar.gz (Who's computer is this?)
[http://www.gnus.org/dist/gnus.tar.gz (Who's computer is this?) ] or via anonymous FTP from
ftp://ftp.gnus.org/pub/gnus/gnus.tar.gz (Who's computer is this?) [ftp://ftp.gnus.org/pub/ (Who's computer is this?)
gnus/gnus.tar.gz].

1.3. What to do with the tarball now?

Untar it via tar xvzf gnus.tar.gz and do the common ./configure;
make; make install circle. (under MS-Windows either get the Cygwin
environment from http://www.cygwin.com (Who's computer is this?) [http://www.cygwin.com (Who's computer is this?) ]
which allows you to do what's described above or unpack the tarball
with some packer (e.g. Winace from http://www.winace.com (Who's computer is this?) [http:// (Who's computer is this?)
www.winace.com]) and use the batch-file make.bat included in the
tarball to install Gnus. If you don't want to (or aren't allowed
to) install Gnus system-wide, you can install it in your home
directory and add the following lines to your ~/.xemacs/init.el or
~/.emacs:

(add-to-list 'load-path "/path/to/gnus/lisp")
(if (featurep 'xemacs)
(add-to-list 'Info-directory-list "/path/to/gnus/texi/")
(add-to-list 'Info-default-directory-list "/path/to/gnus/texi/"))


Make sure that you don't have any gnus related stuff before this
line, on MS Windows use something like "C:/path/to/lisp" (yes, "/
").

1.4. Which version of Emacs do I need?

Gnus 5.8.8 requires an emacs version that is greater than or equal
to Emacs 20.3 or XEmacs 20.1.

1.5. How do I run Gnus on both Emacs and XEmacs?

You can't use the same copy of Gnus in both as the Lisp files are
byte-compiled to a format which is different depending on which
Emacs did the compilation. Get one copy of Gnus for Emacs and one
for XEmacs.

2. Getting Messages

2.1. I just installed Gnus, started it via M-x gnus but it only says
"nntp (news) open error", what to do?

You've got to tell Gnus where to fetch the news from. Read the
documentation for information on how to do this. As a first start,
put those lines in ~/.gnus:

(setq gnus-select-method '(nntp "news.yourprovider.net"))
(setq user-mail-address "you@yourprovider.net")
(setq user-full-name "Your Name")


2.2. I'm working under Windows and have no idea what ~/.gnus means.

The ~/ means the home directory where Gnus and Emacs look for the
configuration files. However, you don't really need to know what
this means, it suffices that Emacs knows what it means :-) You can
type C-x C-f ~/.gnus RET (yes, with the forward slash, even on
Windows), and Emacs will open the right file for you. (It will most
likely be new, and thus empty.) However, I'd discourage you from
doing so, since the directory Emacs chooses will most certainly not
be what you want, so let's do it the correct way. The first thing
you've got to do is to create a suitable directory (no blanks in
directory name please) e.g. c:\myhome. Then you must set the
environment variable HOME to this directory. To do this under Win9x
or Me include the line

SET HOME=C:\myhome


in your autoexec.bat and reboot. Under NT, 2000 and XP, hit
Winkey+Pause/Break to enter system options (if it doesn't work, go
to Control Panel -> System). There you'll find the possibility to
set environment variables, create a new one with name HOME and
value C:\myhome, a reboot is not necessary.

Now to create ~/.gnus, say C-x C-f ~/.gnus RET C-x C-s. in Emacs.

2.3. My Newsserver requires authentification, how to store user name and
password on disk?

Create a file ~/.authinfo which includes for each server a line
like this

machine news.yourprovider.net login YourUserName password YourPassword

.

2.4. Gnus seems to start up OK, but I can't find out how to subscribe to
a group.

If you know the name of the group say U name.of.group RET in
summary buffer (use the tab-completion Luke). Otherwise hit ^ in
summary buffer, this brings you to the server buffer. Now place
point (the cursor) over the server which carries the group you want
and say u to subscribe to it.

2.5. Gnus doesn't show all groups / Gnus says I'm not allowed to post on
this server as well as I am, what's that?

Some providers allow restricted anonymous access and full access
only after authorization. To make Gnus send authinfo to those
servers append

force yes

to the line for those servers in ~/.authinfo.

2.6. I want Gnus to fetch news from several servers, is this possible?

Of course. You can specify more sources for articles in the
variable gnus-secondary-select-methods. Add something like this in
~/.gnus:

(add-to-list 'gnus-secondary-select-methods '(nntp "news.yourSecondProvider.net"))
(add-to-list 'gnus-secondary-select-methods '(nntp "news.yourThirdProvider.net"))


2.7. And how about local spool files?

No problem, this is just one more select method called nnspool, so
you want this:

(add-to-list 'gnus-secondary-select-methods '(nnspool ""))


Or this if you don't want an NNTP Server as primary news source:

(setq gnus-select-method '(nnspool ""))


Gnus will look for the spool file in /usr/spool/news, if you want
something different, change the line above to something like this:

(add-to-list 'gnus-secondary-select-methods
'(nnspool "" (nnspool-directory "/usr/local/myspoolddir")))


This sets the spool directory for this server only. You might have
to specify more stuff like the program used to post articles, see
the Gnus manual on how to do this.

2.8. OK, reading news works now, but I want to be able to read my mail
with Gnus, too. How to do it?

That's a bit harder since there are many possible sources for mail,
many possible ways for storing mail and many different ways for
sending mail. The most common cases are these: 1: You want to read
your mail from a pop3 server and send them directly to a SMTP
Server 2: Some program like fetchmail retrieves your mail and
stores it on disk from where Gnus shall read it. Outgoing mail is
sent by Sendmail, Postfix or some other MTA. Sometimes, you even
need a combination of the above cases.

However, the first thing to do is to tell Gnus in which way it
should store the mail, in Gnus terminology which back end to use.
Gnus supports many different back ends, the most commonly used one
is nnml. It stores every mail in one file and is therefor quite
fast. However you might prefer a one file per group approach if
your file system has problems with many small files, the nnfolder
back end is then probably the choice for you. To use nnml add the
following to ~/.gnus:

(add-to-list 'gnus-secondary-select-methods '(nnml ""))


As you might have guessed, if you want nnfolder, it's

(add-to-list 'gnus-secondary-select-methods '(nnfolder ""))


Now we need to tell Gnus, where to get it's mail from. If it's a
POP3 server, then you need something like this:

(add-to-list 'mail-sources '(pop :server "pop.YourProvider.net"
:user "yourUserName"
:password "yourPassword"))


If you want to read your mail from a traditional spool file on your
local machine, it's

(add-to-list 'mail-sources '(file :path "/path/to/spool/file"))


If it's a Maildir, with one file per message as used by postfix,
Qmail and (optionally) fetchmail it's

(add-to-list 'mail-sources '(maildir :path "/path/to/Maildir/"
:subdirs ("cur" "new")))


And finally if you want to read your mail from several files in one
directory, for example because procmail already splitted your mail,
it's

(add-to-list 'mail-sources '(directory :path "/path/to/procmail-dir/"
:suffix ".prcml"))


Where :suffix ".prcml" tells Gnus only to use files with the suffix
.prcml.

OK, now you only need to tell Gnus how to send mail. If you want to
send mail via sendmail (or whichever MTA is playing the role of
sendmail on your system), you don't need to do anything. However,
if you want to send your mail to an SMTP Server you need the
following in your ~/.gnus

(setq send-mail-function 'smtpmail-send-it)
(setq message-send-mail-function 'smtpmail-send-it)
(setq smtpmail-default-smtp-server "smtp.yourProvider.net")


2.9. And what about IMAP?

There are two ways of using IMAP with Gnus. The first one is to use
IMAP like POP3, that means Gnus fetches the mail from the IMAP
server and stores it on disk. If you want to do this (you don't
really want to do this) add the following to ~/.gnus

(add-to-list 'mail-sources '(imap :server "mail.mycorp.com"
:user "username"
:pass "password"
:stream network
:authentication login
:mailbox "INBOX"
:fetchflag "\\Seen"))


You might have to tweak the values for stream and/or
authentification, see the Gnus manual node "Mail Source Specifiers"
for possible values.

If you want to use IMAP the way it's intended, you've got to follow
a different approach. You've got to add the nnimap back end to your
select method and give the information about the server there.

(add-to-list 'gnus-secondary-select-methods
'(nnimap "Give the baby a name"
(nnimap-address "imap.yourProvider.net")
(nnimap-port 143)
(nnimap-list-pattern "archive.*")))


Again, you might have to specify how to authenticate to the server
if Gnus can't guess the correct way, see the Manual Node "IMAP" for
detailed information.

2.10. At the office we use one of those MS Exchange servers, can I use
Gnus to read my mail from it?

Offer your administrator a pair of new running shoes for activating
IMAP on the server and follow the instructions above.

2.11. Can I tell Gnus not to delete the mails on the server it retrieves
via POP3?

First of all, that's not the way POP3 is intended to work, if you
have the possibility, you should use the IMAP Protocol if you want
your messages to stay on the server. Nevertheless there might be
situations where you need the feature, but sadly Gnus itself has no
predefined functionality to do so.

However this is Gnus county so there are possibilities to achieve
what you want. The easiest way is to get an external program which
retrieves copies of the mail and stores them on disk, so Gnus can
read it from there. On Unix systems you could use e.g. fetchmail
for this, on MS Windows you can use Hamster, an excellent local
news and mail server.

The other solution would be, to replace the method Gnus uses to get
mail from POP3 servers by one which is capable of leaving the mail
on the server. If you use XEmacs, get the package mail-lib, it
includes an enhanced pop3.el, look in the file, there's
documentation on how to tell Gnus to use it and not to delete the
retrieved mail. For GNU Emacs look for the file epop3.el which can
do the same (If you know the home of this file, please send me an
e-mail). You can also tell Gnus to use an external program (e.g.
fetchmail) to fetch your mail, see the info node "Mail Source
Specifiers" in the Gnus manual on how to do it.

3. Reading messages

3.1. When I enter a group, all read messages are gone. How to view them
again?

If you enter the group by saying RET in summary buffer with point
over the group, only unread and ticked messages are loaded. Say C-u
RET instead to load all available messages. If you want only the
e.g. 300 newest say C-u 300 RET

Loading only unread messages can be annoying if you have threaded
view enabled, say

(setq gnus-fetch-old-headers 'some)


in ~/.gnus to load enough old articles to prevent teared threads,
replace 'some with t to load all articles (Warning: Both settings
enlarge the amount of data which is fetched when you enter a group
and slow down the process of entering a group).

If you use Oort Gnus, you can say /o N In summary buffer to load
the last N messages, this feature is not available in 5.8.8

3.2. How to tell Gnus to show an important message every time I enter a
group, even when it's read?

You can tick important messages. To do this hit u while point is in
summary buffer over the message. When you want to remove the mark,
hit either d (this deletes the tick mark and set's unread mark) or
M c (which deletes all marks for the message).

3.3. How to view the headers of a message?

Say t to show all headers, one more t hides them again.

3.4. How to view the raw unformatted message?

Say C-u g to show the raw message g returns to normal view.

3.5. How can I change the headers Gnus displays by default at the top of
the article buffer?

The variable gnus-visible-headers controls which headers are shown,
its value is a regular expression, header lines which match it are
shown. So if you want author, subject, date, and if the header
exists, Followup-To and MUA / NUA say this in ~/.gnus:

(setq gnus-visible-headers
"^\\(From:\\|Subject:\\|Date:\\|Followup-To:\\|X-Newsreader:\\|User-Agent:\\|X-Mailer:\\)")


3.6. I'd like Gnus NOT to render HTML-mails but show me the text part if
it's available. How to do it?

Say

(eval-after-load "mm-decode"
'(add-to-list 'mm-discouraged-alternatives "text/html"))
(eval-after-load "mm-decode"
'(add-to-list 'mm-discouraged-alternatives "text/richtext"))


in ~/.gnus. If you don't want HTML rendered, even if there's no
text alternative add

(setq mm-automatic-display (remove "text/html" mm-automatic-display))


too.

3.7. Can I use some other browser than w3 to render my HTML-mails?

Only if you use Oort Gnus. In this case you've got the choice
between w3, w3m, links, lynx and html2text, which one is used can
be specified in the variable mm-text-html-renderer, so if you want
links to render your mail say

(setq mm-text-html-renderer 'links)


3.8. Is there anything I can do to make poorly formatted mails more
readable?

Gnus offers you several functions to "wash" incoming mail, you can
find them if you browse through the menu, item Article->Washing.
The most interesting ones are probably "Wrap long lines" ( W w ),
"Decode ROT13" ( W r ) and "Outlook Deuglify" which repairs the
dumb quoting used by many users of Microsoft products ( W k ) sadly
the last one is only available in Oort Gnus.

3.9. Is there a way to automatically ignore posts by specific authors or
with specific words in the subject? And can I highlight more
interesting ones in some way?

You want Scoring. Scoring means, that you define rules which assign
each message an integer value. Depending on the value the message
is highlighted in summary buffer (if it's high, say +2000) or
automatically marked read (if the value is low, say -800) or some
other action happens.

There are basically three ways of setting up rules which assign the
scoring-value to messages. The first and easiest way is to set up
rules based on the article you are just reading. Say you're reading
a message by a guy who always writes nonsense and you want to
ignore his messages in the future. Hit L, to set up a rule which
lowers the score. Now Gnus asks you which the criteria for lowering
the Score shall be. Hit ? twice to see all possibilities, we want a
which means the author (the from header). Now Gnus wants to know
which kind of matching we want. Hit either e for an exact match or
s for substring-match and delete afterwards everything but the name
to score down all authors with the given name no matter which email
address is used. Now you need to tell Gnus when to apply the rule
and how long it should last, hit e.g. p to apply the rule now and
let it last forever. If you want to raise the score instead of
lowering it say I instead of L.

You can also set up rules by hand. To do this say V f in summary
buffer. Then you are asked for the name of the score file, it's
name.of.group.SCORE for rules valid in only one group or all.Score
for rules valid in all groups. See the Gnus manual for the exact
syntax, basically it's one big list whose elements are lists again.
the first element of those lists is the header to score on, then
one more list with what to match, which score to assign, when to
expire the rule and how to do the matching. If you find me very
interesting, you could e.g. add the following to your all.Score:

(("references" ("hschmi22.userfqdn.rz-online.de" 500 nil s))
("message-id" ("hschmi22.userfqdn.rz-online.de" 999 nil s)))


This would add 999 to the score of messages written by me and 500
to the score of messages which are a (possibly indirect) answer to
a message written by me. Of course nobody with a sane mind would do
this :-)

The third alternative is adaptive scoring. This means Gnus watches
you and tries to find out what you find interesting and what
annoying and sets up rules which reflect this. Adaptive scoring can
be a huge help when reading high traffic groups. If you want to
activate adaptive scoring say

(setq gnus-use-adaptive-scoring t)


in ~/.gnus.

3.10. How can I disable threading in some (e.g. mail-) groups, or set
other variables specific for some groups?

While in group buffer move point over the group and hit G c, this
opens a buffer where you can set options for the group. At the
bottom of the buffer you'll find an item that allows you to set
variables locally for the group. To disable threading enter
gnus-show-threads as name of variable and nil as value. Hit button
done at the top of the buffer when you're ready.

3.11. Can I highlight messages written by me and follow-ups to those?

Stop those "can I ..." questions, the answer is always yes in Gnus
Country :-). It's a three step process: First we make faces
(specifications of how summary-line shall look like) for those
postings, then we'll give them some special score and finally we'll
tell Gnus to use the new faces. You can find detailed instructions
on how to do it on my.gnus.org [http://my.gnus.org/Members/dzimmerm (Who's computer is this?)
/HowTo%2C2002-07-25%2C1027619165012198456/view]

3.12. The number of total messages in a group which Gnus displays in
group buffer is by far to high, especially in mail groups. Is this
a bug?

No, that's a matter of design of Gnus, fixing this would mean
reimplementation of major parts of Gnus' back ends. Gnus thinks
"highest-article-number - lowest-article-number =
total-number-of-articles". This works OK for Usenet groups, but if
you delete and move many messages in mail groups, this fails. To
cure the symptom, enter the group via C-u RET (this makes Gnus get
all messages), then hit M P b to mark all messages and then say B m
name.of.group to move all messages to the group they have been in
before, they get new message numbers in this process and the count
is right again (until you delete and move your mail to other groups
again).

3.13. I don't like the layout of summary and article buffer, how to
change it? Perhaps even a three pane display?

You can control the windows configuration by calling the function
gnus-add-configuration. The syntax is a bit complicated but
explained very well in the manual node "Window Layout". Some
popular examples:

Instead 25% summary 75% article buffer 35% summary and 65% article
(the 1.0 for article means "take the remaining space"):

(gnus-add-configuration '(article (vertical 1.0 (summary .35 point) (article 1.0))))


A three pane layout, Group buffer on the left, summary buffer
top-right, article buffer bottom-right:

(gnus-add-configuration
'(article
(horizontal 1.0
(vertical 25
(group 1.0))
(vertical 1.0
(summary 0.25 point)
(article 1.0)))))
(gnus-add-configuration
'(summary
(horizontal 1.0
(vertical 25
(group 1.0))
(vertical 1.0
(summary 1.0 point)))))


3.14. I don't like the way the Summary buffer looks, how to tweak it?

You've got to play around with the variable
gnus-summary-line-format. It's value is a string of symbols which
stand for things like author, date, subject etc. A list of the
available specifiers can be found in the manual node "Summary
Buffer Lines" and the often forgotten node "Formatting Variables"
and it's sub-nodes. There you'll find useful things like
positioning the cursor and tabulators which allow you a summary in
table form, but sadly hard tabulators are broken in 5.8.8.

Oort Gnus offers you some very nice new specifiers, e.g. %B which
draws a thread-tree and %&user-date which gives you a date where
the details are dependent of the articles age. Here's an example
which uses both, DON'T TRY TO USE IT WITH 5.8.8!

(setq gnus-summary-line-format ":%U%R %B %s %-60=|%4L |%-20,20f |%&user-date; \n")


resulting in:

:O Re: [Richard Stallman] rfc2047.el | 13 |Lars Magne Ingebrigt |Sat 23:06
:O Re: Revival of the ding-patches list | 13 |Lars Magne Ingebrigt |Sat 23:12
:R > Re: Find correct list of articles for a gro| 25 |Lars Magne Ingebrigt |Sat 23:16
:O \-> ... | 21 |Kai Grossjohann | 0:01
:R > Re: Cry for help: deuglify.el - moving stuf| 28 |Lars Magne Ingebrigt |Sat 23:34
:O \-> ... | 115 |Raymond Scholz | 1:24
:O \-> ... | 19 |Lars Magne Ingebrigt |15:33
:O Slow mailing list | 13 |Lars Magne Ingebrigt |Sat 23:49
:O Re: `@' mark not documented | 13 |Lars Magne Ingebrigt |Sat 23:50
:R > Re: Gnus still doesn't count messages prope| 23 |Lars Magne Ingebrigt |Sat 23:57
:O \-> ... | 18 |Kai Grossjohann | 0:35
:O \-> ... | 13 |Lars Magne Ingebrigt | 0:56


3.15. How to split incoming mails in several groups?

Gnus offers two possibilities for splitting mail, the easy
nnmail-split-methods and the more powerful Fancy Mail Splitting.
I'll only talk about the first one, refer to the manual, node
"Fancy Mail Splitting" for the latter.

The value of nnmail-split-methods is a list, each element is a list
which stands for a splitting rule. Each rule has the form "group
where matching articles should go to", "regular expression which
has to be matched", the first rule which matches wins. The last
rule must always be a general rule (regular expression .*) which
denotes where articles should go which don't match any other rule.
If the folder doesn't exist yet, it will be created as soon as an
article lands there. By default the mail will be send to all groups
whose rules match. If you don't want that (you probably don't
want), say

(setq nnmail-crosspost nil)


in ~/.gnus.

An example might be better than thousand words, so here's my
nnmail-split-methods. Note that I send duplicates in a special
group and that the default group is spam, since I filter all mails
out which are from some list I'm subscribed to or which are
addressed directly to me before. Those rules kill about 80% of the
Spam which reaches me (Email addresses are changed to prevent
spammers from using them):

(setq nnmail-split-methods
'(("duplicates" "^Gnus-Warning:.*duplicate")
("XEmacs-NT" "^\\(To:\\|CC:\\).*localpart@xemacs.bla.*")
("Gnus-Tut" "^\\(To:\\|CC:\\).*localpart@socha.bla.*")
("tcsh" "^\\(To:\\|CC:\\).*localpart@mx.gw.bla.*")
("BAfH" "^\\(To:\\|CC:\\).*localpart@.*uni-muenchen.bla.*")
("Hamster-src" "^\\(CC:\\|To:\\).*hamster-sourcen@yahoogroups.\\(de\\|com\\).*")
("Tagesschau" "^From: tagesschau <localpart@www.tagesschau.bla>$")
("Replies" "^\\(CC:\\|To:\\).*localpart@Frank-Schmitt.bla.*")
("EK" "^From:.*\\(localpart@privateprovider.bla\\|localpart@workplace.bla\\).*")
("Spam" "^Content-Type:.*\\(ks_c_5601-1987\\|EUC-KR\\|big5\\|iso-2022-jp\\).*")
("Spam" "^Subject:.*\\(This really work\\|XINGA\\|ADV:\\|XXX\\|adult\\|sex\\).*")
("Spam" "^Subject:.*\\(\=\?ks_c_5601-1987\?\\|\=\?euc-kr\?\\|\=\?big5\?\\).*")
("Spam" "^X-Mailer:\\(.*BulkMailer.*\\|.*MIME::Lite.*\\|\\)")
("Spam" "^X-Mailer:\\(.*CyberCreek Avalanche\\|.*http\:\/\/GetResponse\.com\\)")
("Spam" "^From:.*\\(verizon\.net\\|prontomail\.com\\|money\\|ConsumerDirect\\).*")
("Spam" "^Delivered-To: GMX delivery to spamtrap@gmx.bla$")
("Spam" "^Received: from link2buy.com")
("Spam" "^CC: .*azzrael@t-online.bla")
("Spam" "^X-Mailer-Version: 1.50 BETA")
("Uni" "^\\(CC:\\|To:\\).*localpart@uni-koblenz.bla.*")
("Inbox" "^\\(CC:\\|To:\\).*\\(my\ name\\|address@one.bla\\|adress@two.bla\\)")
("Spam" "")))


4. Composing messages

4.1. What are the basic commands I need to know for sending mail and
postings?

To start composing a new mail hit m either in Group or Summary
buffer, for a posting, it's either a in Group buffer and filling
the Newsgroups header manually or a in the Summary buffer of the
group where the posting shall be send to. Replying by mail is r if
you don't want to cite the author, or import the cited text
manually and R to cite the text of the original message. For a
follow up to a newsgroup, it's f and F (analog to r and R.

Enter new headers above the line saying "--text follows this
line--", enter the text below the line. When ready hit C-c C-c, to
send the message, if you want to finish it later hit C-c C-d to
save it in the drafts group, where you can start editing it again
by saying D e.

4.2. How to enable automatic word-wrap when composing messages?

Say

(add-hook 'message-mode-hook
(lambda ()
(setq fill-column 72)
(turn-on-auto-fill)))


in ~/.gnus. You can reformat a paragraph by hitting M-q (as usual)

4.3. How to set stuff like From, Organization, Reply-To, signature...?

There are other ways, but you should use posting styles for this.
(See below why). This example should make the syntax clear:

(setq gnus-posting-styles
'((".*"
(name "Frank Schmitt")
(address "me@there.bla")
(organization "Hamme net, kren mer och nimmi")
(signature-file "~/.signature")
("X-SampleHeader" "foobar")
(eval (setq some-variable "Foo bar")))))


The ".*" means that this settings are the default ones (see below),
valid values for the first element of the following lists are
signature, signature-file, organization, address, name or body. The
attribute name can also be a string. 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. You can also say (eval (foo bar)), then the function
foo will be evaluated with argument bar and the result will be
thrown away.

4.4. Can I set things like From, Signature etc group based on the group
I post too?

That's the strength of posting styles. Before, we used ".*" to set
the default for all groups. You can use a regexp like "^gmane" and
the following settings are only applied to postings you send to the
gmane hierarchy, use ".*binaries" instead and they will be applied
to postings send to groups containing the string binaries in their
name etc.

You can instead of specifying a regexp specify a function which is
evaluated, only if it returns true, the corresponding settings take
effect. Two interesting candidates for this are message-news-p
which returns t if the current Group is a newsgroup and the
corresponding message-mail-p.

Note that all forms that match are applied, that means in the
example below, when I post to gmane.mail.spam.spamassassin.general,
the settings under ".*" are applied and the settings under
message-news-p and those under "^gmane" and those under "^gmane\
\.mail\\.spam\\.spamassassin\\.general$". Because of this put
general settings at the top and specific ones at the bottom.

(setq gnus-posting-styles
'((".*" ;;default
(name "Frank Schmitt")
(organization "Hamme net, kren mer och nimmi")
(signature-file "~/.signature") )
((message-news-p) ;;Usenet news?
(address "mySpamTrap@Frank-Schmitt.bla")
("Reply-To" "hereRealRepliesOnlyPlease@Frank-Schmitt.bla") )
((message-mail-p) ;;mail?
(address "usedForMails@Frank-Schmitt.bla") )
("^gmane" ;;this is mail, too in fact
(address "usedForMails@Frank-Schmitt.net")
("Reply-To" nil) )
("^gmane.mail.spam.spamassassin.general$"
(eval (setq mail-envelope-from "Azzrael@rz-online.de"))
(address "Azzrael@rz-online.de")) ))


4.5. Is there a spell-checker? Perhaps even on-the-fly spell-checking?

You can use ispell.el to spell-check stuff in Emacs. So the first
thing to do is to make sure that you've got either ispell [http:// (Who's computer is this?)
fmg-www.cs.ucla.edu/fmg-members/geoff/ispell.html] or aspell [http:
//aspell.sourceforge.net/] installed and in your Path. Then you
need ispell.el [http://www.kdstevens.com/~stevens/ispell-page.html (Who's computer is this?) ]
and for on-the-fly spell-checking flyspell.el [http:// (Who's computer is this?)
www-sop.inria.fr/mimosa/personnel/Manuel.Serrano/flyspell/
flyspell.html]. Ispell.el is shipped with Gnus Emacs and available
through the Emacs package system, flyspell.el is shipped with Emacs
and part of XEmacs text-modes package which is available through
the package system, so there should be no need to install them
manually.

Ispell.el assumes you use ispell, if you choose aspell say

(setq ispell-program-name "aspell")

in your Emacs configuration file.

If you want your outgoing messages to be spell-checked, say

(add-hook 'message-send-hook 'ispell-message)

In your ~/.gnus, if you prefer on-the-fly spell-checking say

(add-hook 'message-mode-hook (lambda () (flyspell-mode 1)))

4.6. Can I set the dictionary based on the group I'm posting to?

Yes, say something like

(add-hook 'gnus-select-group-hook
(lambda ()
(cond
((string-match
"^de\\." (gnus-group-real-name gnus-newsgroup-name))
(ispell-change-dictionary "deutsch8"))
(t
(ispell-change-dictionary "english")))))


in ~/.gnus. Change "^de\\." and "deutsch8" to something that suits
your needs.

4.7. Is there some kind of address-book, so I needn't remember all those
email addresses?

There's an very basic solution for this, mail aliases. You can
store your mail addresses in a ~/.mailrc file using a simple alias
syntax:

alias al "Al <al@english-heritage.org.uk>"


Then typing your alias (followed by a space or punctuation
character) on a To: or Cc: line in the message buffer will cause
gnus to insert the full address for you. See the node "Mail
Aliases" in Message (not Gnus) manual for details.

However, what you really want is the Insidious Big Brother Database
bbdb. Get it through the XEmacs package system or from bbdb's
homepage [http://bbdb.sourceforge.net/ (Who's computer is this?) ]. Now place the following in
~/.gnus, to activate bbdb for Gnus:

(require 'bbdb)
(bbdb-initialize 'gnus 'message)


Now you probably want some general bbdb configuration, place them
in ~/.emacs:

(require 'bbdb)
;;If you don't live in Northern America, you should disable the
;;syntax check for telephone numbers by saying
(setq bbdb-north-american-phone-numbers-p nil)
;;Tell bbdb about your email address:
(setq bbdb-user-mail-names
(regexp-opt '("Your.Email@here.bla"
"Your.other@mail.there.bla")))
;;cycling while completing email addresses
(setq bbdb-complete-name-allow-cycling t)
;;No popup-buffers
(setq bbdb-use-pop-up nil)


Now you should be ready to go. Say M-x bbdb RET RET to open a bbdb
buffer showing all entries. Say c to create a new entry, b to
search your BBDB and C-o to add a new field to an entry. If you
want to add a sender to the BBDB you can also just hit `:' on the
posting in the summary buffer and you are done. When you now
compose a new mail, hit TAB to cycle through know recipients.

4.8. Sometimes I see little images at the top of article buffer. What's
that and how can I send one with my postings, too?

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/ (Who's computer is this?) ]. 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/ (Who's computer is this?) [http://www.dairiki.org/xface/ (Who's computer is this?) ]. If
you use MS Windows, you could also use the WinFace program from
http://www.xs4all.nl/~walterln/winface/ (Who's computer is this?) [http://www.xs4all.nl/ (Who's computer is this?)
~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.

4.9. Sometimes I accidentally hit r instead of f in newsgroups. Can Gnus
warn me, when I'm replying by mail in newsgroups?

Put this in ~/.gnus:

(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))


In Oort you can use

(setq gnus-confirm-mail-reply-to-news t)


instead to achieve the same result.

4.10. How to tell Gnus not to generate a sender header?

Say

(eval-after-load "message"
'(add-to-list 'message-syntax-checks '(sender . disabled)))


in ~/.gnus. (This is the default behaviour in Oort Gnus.)

4.11. I want gnus to locally store copies of my send mail and news, how
to do it?

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")))


4.12. People tell me my Message-IDs are not correct, why aren't they and
how to fix it?

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:

(defun message-make-message-id()
(concat "<"(message-unique-id)"@yourmachine.yourdomain.tld>"))


in ~/.gnus. 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 (Who's computer is this?)
/~dlx/addfqdn.html [http://www.stura.tu-freiberg.de/~dlx/ (Who's computer is this?)
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.

5. Old messages

5.1. How to import my old mail into Gnus?

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:// (Who's computer is this?)
mbx2mbox.sourceforge.net/ [http://mbx2mbox.sourceforge.net/ (Who's computer is this?) ].

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.

5.2. How to archive interesting messages?

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
<pille3003@fhaun.de> 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.

5.3. How to search for a specific message?

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 (Who's computer is this?) ] (in Oort Gnus you can search
groups.google.com with G W), 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.

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/ (Who's computer is this?) [ftp:// (Who's computer is this?)
ls6-ftp.cs.uni-dortmund.de/pub/src/emacs/] or ftp:// (Who's computer is this?)
ftp.is.informatik.uni-duisburg.de/pub/src/emacs/ [ftp:// (Who's computer is this?)
ftp.is.informatik.uni-duisburg.de/pub/src/emacs/]. Instructions on
how to use it are at the top of the file.

5.4. How to get rid of old unwanted mail?

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.

5.5. I want that all read messages are expired (at least in some
groups). How to do it?

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 everytime 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).

5.6. I don't want expiration to delete my mails but to move them to
another group.

Say something like this in ~/.gnus: