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 backend to use (e.g. nntp
,
nnspool
, nnml
) and the second element is the server
name. There may be additional elements in the select method, where the
value may have special meaning for the backend in question.
One could say that a select method defines a virtual server---so we do just that (see section The Server Buffer).
The name of the group is the name the backend will recognize the group as.
For instance, the group `soc.motss' on the NNTP server
`some.where.edu' will have the name `soc.motss' and select
method (nntp "some.where.edu")
. Gnus will call this group
`nntp+some.where.edu:soc.motss', even though the nntp
backend just knows this group as `soc.motss'.
The different methods all have their peculiarities, of course.
Traditionally, a server is a machine or a piece of software that one connects to, and then requests information from. Gnus does not connect directly to any real servers, but does all transactions through one backend or other. But that's just putting one layer more between the actual media and Gnus, so we might just as well say that each backend represents a virtual server.
For instance, the nntp
backend may be used to connect to several
different actual NNTP servers, or, perhaps, to many different ports
on the same actual NNTP server. You tell Gnus which backend to
use, and what parameters to set by specifying a select method.
These select 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. Anyways, if you had to specify that for each group that used this server, that would be too much work, so Gnus offers a way of naming select methods, which is what you do in the server buffer.
To enter the server buffer, use the ^
(gnus-group-enter-server-mode
) command in the group buffer.
gnus-server-mode-hook
is run when creating the server buffer.
You can change the look of the server buffer lines by changing the
gnus-server-line-format
variable. This is a format
-like
variable, with some simple extensions:
The mode line can also be customized by using the
gnus-server-mode-line-format
variable (see section Mode Line Formatting). The following specs are understood:
Also see section Formatting Variables.
gnus-server-add-server
).
gnus-server-edit-server
).
gnus-server-read-server
).
gnus-server-exit
).
gnus-server-kill-server
).
gnus-server-yank-server
).
gnus-server-copy-server
).
gnus-server-list-servers
).
gnus-server-scan-server
). This is mainly sensible with mail
servers.
gnus-server-regenerate-server
). This can be useful if you have
a mail backend that has gotten out of synch.
Most select methods are pretty simple and self-explanatory:
(nntp "news.funet.fi")
Reading directly from the spool is even simpler:
(nnspool "")
As you can see, the first element in a select method is the name of the backend, and the second is the address, or name, if you will.
After these two elements, there may be 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 backend to find out what
variables are relevant, but here's an nnmh
example:
nnmh
is a mail backend that reads a spool-like structure. Say
you have two structures that you wish to access: One is your private
mail spool, and the other is a public one. Here's the possible spec for
your private mail:
(nnmh "private" (nnmh-directory "~/private/mail/"))
(This server is then called `private', but you may have guessed that.)
Here's the method for a public spool:
(nnmh "public" (nnmh-directory "/usr/information/spool/") (nnmh-get-new-mail nil))
If you are behind a firewall and only have access to the NNTP
server from the firewall machine, you can instruct Gnus to rlogin
on the firewall machine and telnet from there to the NNTP server.
Doing this can be rather fiddly, but your virtual server definition
should probably look something like this:
(nntp "firewall" (nntp-address "the.firewall.machine") (nntp-open-connection-function nntp-open-rlogin) (nntp-end-of-line "\n") (nntp-rlogin-parameters ("telnet" "the.real.nntp.host" "nntp")))
If you want to use the wonderful ssh
program to provide a
compressed connection over the modem line, you could create a virtual
server that would look something like this:
(nntp "news" (nntp-address "copper.uio.no") (nntp-rlogin-program "ssh") (nntp-open-connection-function nntp-open-rlogin) (nntp-end-of-line "\n") (nntp-rlogin-parameters ("telnet" "news.uio.no" "nntp")))
This means that you have to have set up ssh-agent
correctly to
provide automatic authorization, of course. And to get a compressed
connection, you have to have the `Compression' option in the
ssh
`config' file.
If you're saving lots of articles in the cache by using persistent articles, you may want to create a virtual server to read the cache.
First you need to add a new server. The a command does that. It
would probably be best to use nnspool
to read the cache. You
could also use nnml
or nnmh
, though.
Type a nnspool RET cache RET.
You should now have a brand new nnspool
virtual server called
`cache'. You now need to edit it to have the right definitions.
Type e to edit the server. You'll be entered into a buffer that
will contain the following:
(nnspool "cache")
Change that to:
(nnspool "cache" (nnspool-spool-directory "~/News/cache/") (nnspool-nov-directory "~/News/cache/") (nnspool-active-file "~/News/cache/active"))
Type C-c C-c to return to the server buffer. If you now press RET over this virtual server, you should be entered into a browse buffer, and you should be able to enter any of the groups displayed.
One sticky point when defining variables (both on backends and in Emacs in general) is that some variables are typically initialized from other variables when the definition of the variables is being loaded. If you change the "base" variable after the variables have been loaded, you won't change the "derived" variables.
This typically affects directory and file variables. For instance,
nnml-directory
is `~/Mail/' by default, and all nnml
directory variables are initialized from that variable, so
nnml-active-file
will be `~/Mail/active'. If you define a
new virtual nnml
server, it will not suffice to set just
nnml-directory
---you have to explicitly set all the file
variables to be what you want them to be. For a complete list of
variables for each backend, see each backend's section later in this
manual, but here's an example nnml
definition:
(nnml "public" (nnml-directory "~/my-mail/") (nnml-active-file "~/my-mail/active") (nnml-newsgroups-file "~/my-mail/newsgroups"))
Wherever you would normally use a select method
(e.g. gnus-secondary-select-method
, in the group select method,
when browsing a foreign server) you can use a virtual server name
instead. This could potentially save lots of typing. And it's nice all
over.
If a server seems to be unreachable, Gnus will mark that server as
denied
. That means that any subsequent attempt to make contact
with that server will just be ignored. "It can't be opened," Gnus
will tell you, without making the least effort to see whether that is
actually the case or not.
That might seem quite naughty, but it does make sense most of the time. Let's say you have 10 groups subscribed to on server `nephelococcygia.com'. This server is located somewhere quite far away from you and the machine is quite slow, so it takes 1 minute just to find out that it refuses connection to you today. If Gnus were to attempt to do that 10 times, you'd be quite annoyed, so Gnus won't attempt to do that. Once it has gotten a single "connection refused", it will regard that server as "down".
So, what happens if the machine was only feeling unwell temporarily? How do you test to see whether the machine has come up again?
You jump to the server buffer (see section The Server Buffer) and poke it with the following commands:
gnus-server-open-server
).
gnus-server-close-server
).
gnus-server-deny-server
).
gnus-server-open-all-servers
).
gnus-server-close-all-servers
).
gnus-server-remove-denials
).
A newsreader is normally used for reading news. Gnus currently provides only two methods of getting news--it can read from an NNTP server, or it can read from a local spool.
Subscribing to a foreign group from an NNTP server is rather easy.
You just specify nntp
as method and the address of the NNTP
server as the, uhm, address.
If the NNTP server is located at a non-standard port, setting the third element of the select method to this port number should allow you to connect to the right port. You'll have to edit the group info for that (see 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
MODE READER
to the server with the
nntp-send-mode-reader
function. This function should always be
present in this hook.
nntp-authinfo-function
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:
ftp
token, which is the only way the
`.authinfo' file format deviates from the `.netrc' file
format.)
machine news.uio.no login larsi password geheimnis machine nntp.ifi.uio.no login larsi force yesThe 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 yesThis will force sending `AUTHINFO' commands to all servers not previously mentioned. Remember to not leave the `~/.authinfo' file world-readable.
nntp-server-action-alist
(setq nntp-server-action-alist '(("innd" (ding))))You probably don't want to do that, though. The default value is
'(("nntpd 1\\.5\\.11t" (remove-hook 'nntp-server-opened-hook 'nntp-send-mode-reader)))This ensures that Gnus doesn't send the
MODE READER
command to
nntpd 1.5.11t, since that command chokes that server, I've been told.
nntp-maximum-request
head
commands. To
speed things up, the backend sends lots of these commands without
waiting for reply, and then reads all the replies. This is controlled
by the nntp-maximum-request
variable, and is 400 by default. If
your network is buggy, you should set this to 1.
nntp-connection-timeout
nntp
groups that you connect to
regularly, you're sure to have problems with NNTP servers not
responding properly, or being too loaded to reply within reasonable
time. This is can lead to awkward problems, which can be helped
somewhat by setting nntp-connection-timeout
. This is an integer
that says how many seconds the nntp
backend should wait for a
connection before giving up. If it is nil
, which is the default,
no timeouts are done.
nntp-server-hook
nntp-open-connection-function
nntp-open-network-stream
nntp-open-rlogin
nntp-open-rlogin
-related variables:
nntp-rlogin-program
nntp-rlogin-parameters
rsh
.
nntp-rlogin-user-name
nntp-open-telnet
nntp-open-telnet
-related variables:
nntp-telnet-command
telnet
.
nntp-telnet-switches
telnet
command.
nntp-telnet-user-name
nntp-telnet-passwd
nntp-telnet-parameters
telnet
.
nntp-telnet-shell-prompt
nntp-open-telnet-envuser
nil
, the 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-open-ssl-stream
;; Type `C-c C-c' after you've finished editing. ;; ;; "snews" is port 563 and is predefined in our /etc/services ;; (nntp "snews.bar.com" (nntp-open-connection-function nntp-open-ssl-stream) (nntp-port-number "snews") (nntp-address "snews.bar.com"))
nntp-end-of-line
rlogin
to talk to the server.
nntp-rlogin-user-name
rlogin
connect
function.
nntp-address
nntp-port-number
nntp-open-network-stream
connect function.
nntp-buggy-select
nil
if your select routine is buggy.
nntp-nov-is-evil
t
, but nntp
usually checks automatically whether NOV
can be used.
nntp-xover-commands
("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-prepare-server-hook
nntp-warn-about-losing-connection
nil
, some noise will be made when a
server closes connection.
nntp-record-commands
nil
, nntp
will log all commands it sends to the
NNTP server (along with a timestep) in the `*nntp-log*'
buffer. This is useful if you are debugging a Gnus/NNTP connection
that doesn't seem to work.
Subscribing to a foreign group from the local spool is extremely easy, and might be useful, for instance, to speed up reading groups that contain very big articles---`alt.binaries.pictures.furniture', for instance.
Anyways, you just specify nnspool
as the method and ""
(or
anything else) as the address.
If you have access to a local spool, you should probably use that as the
native select method (see 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
nnspool-inews-switches
nnspool-spool-directory
nnspool
looks for the articles. This is normally
`/usr/spool/news/'.
nnspool-nov-directory
nnspool
will look for NOV files. This is normally
`/usr/spool/news/over.view/'.
nnspool-lib-dir
nnspool-active-file
nnspool-newsgroups-file
nnspool-history-file
nnspool-active-times-file
nnspool-nov-is-evil
nil
, nnspool
won't try to use any NOV files
that it finds.
nnspool-sift-nov-with-sed
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.
Reading mail with a newsreader--isn't that just plain WeIrD? But of course.
If you are used to traditional mail readers, but have decided to switch to reading mail with Gnus, you may find yourself experiencing something of a culture shock.
Gnus does not behave like traditional mail readers. If you want to make it behave that way, you can, but it's an uphill battle.
Gnus, by default, handles all its groups using the same approach. This approach is very newsreaderly--you enter a group, see the new/unread messages, and when you read the messages, they get marked as read, and you don't see them any more. (Unless you explicitly ask for them.)
In particular, you do not do anything explicitly to delete messages.
Does this mean that all the messages that have been marked as read are deleted? How awful!
But, no, it means that old messages are expired according to some scheme or other. For news messages, the expire process is controlled by the news administrator; for mail, the expire process is controlled by you. The expire process for mail is covered in depth in see section Expiring Mail.
What many Gnus users find, after using it a while for both news and mail, is that the transport mechanism has very little to do with how they want to treat a message.
Many people subscribe to several mailing lists. These are transported via SMTP, and are therefore mail. But we might go for weeks without answering, or even reading these messages very carefully. We may not need to save them because if we should need to read one again, they are archived somewhere else.
Some people have local news groups which have only a handful of readers. These are transported via NNTP, and are therefore news. But we may need to read and answer a large fraction of the messages very carefully in order to do our work. And there may not be an archive, so we may need to save the interesting messages the same way we would personal mail.
The important distinction turns out to be not the transport mechanism, but other factors such as how interested we are in the subject matter, or how easy it is to retrieve the message if we need to read it again.
Gnus provides many options for sorting mail into "groups" which behave like newsgroups, and for treating each group (whether mail or news) differently.
Some users never get comfortable using the Gnus (ahem) paradigm and wish that Gnus should grow up and be a male, er, mail reader. It is possible to whip Gnus into a more mailreaderly being, but, as said before, it's not easy. People who prefer proper mail readers should try VM instead, which is an excellent, and proper, mail reader.
I don't mean to scare anybody off, but I want to make it clear that you may be required to learn a new way of thinking about messages. After you've been subjected to The Gnus Way, you will come to love it. I can guarantee it. (At least the guy who sold me the Emacs Subliminal Brain-Washing Functions that I've put into Gnus did guarantee it. You Will Be Assimilated. You Love Gnus. You Love The Gnus Mail Way. You Do.)
It's quite easy to use Gnus to read your new mail. You just plonk the
mail backend of your choice into gnus-secondary-select-methods
,
and things will happen automatically.
For instance, if you want to use nnml
(which is a "one file per
mail" backend), you could put the following in your `.gnus' file:
(setq gnus-secondary-select-methods '((nnml "private")))
Now, the next time you start Gnus, this backend will be queried for new
articles, and it will move all the messages in your spool file to its
directory, which is ~/Mail/
by default. The new group that will
be created (`mail.misc') will be subscribed, and you can read it
like any other group.
You will probably want to split the mail into several groups, though:
(setq nnmail-split-methods '(("junk" "^From:.*Lars Ingebrigtsen") ("crazy" "^Subject:.*die\\|^Organization:.*flabby") ("other" "")))
This will result in three new nnml
mail groups being created:
`nnml:junk', `nnml:crazy', and `nnml:other'. All the
mail that doesn't fit into the first two groups will be placed in the
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 Backend and see section Expiring Mail.
The nnmail-split-methods
variable says how the incoming mail is
to be split into groups.
(setq nnmail-split-methods '(("mail.junk" "^From:.*Lars Ingebrigtsen") ("mail.crazy" "^Subject:.*die\\|^Organization:.*flabby") ("mail.other" "")))
This variable is a list of lists, where the first element of each of
these lists is the name of the mail group (they do not have to be called
something beginning with `mail', by the way), and the second
element is a regular expression used on the header of each mail to
determine if it belongs in this mail group. The first string may
contain `\\1' forms, like the ones used by replace-match
to
insert sub-expressions from the matched text. For instance:
("list.\\1" "From:.* \\(.*\\)-list@majordomo.com")
The second element can also be a function. In that case, it will be
called narrowed to the headers with the first element of the rule as the
argument. It should return a non-nil
value if it thinks that the
mail belongs in that group.
The last of these groups should always be a general one, and the regular expression should always be `' so that it matches any mails that haven't been matched by any of the other regexps. (These rules are processed from the beginning of the alist toward the end. The first rule to make a match will "win", unless you have crossposting enabled. In that case, all matching rules will "win".)
If you like to tinker with this yourself, you can set this variable to a function of your choice. This function will be called without any arguments in a buffer narrowed to the headers of an incoming mail message. The function should return a list of group names that it thinks should carry this mail message.
Note that the mail backends are free to maul the poor, innocent,
incoming headers all they want to. They all add Lines
headers;
some add X-Gnus-Group
headers; most rename the Unix mbox
From<SPACE>
line to something else.
The mail backends all support cross-posting. If several regexps match,
the mail will be "cross-posted" to all those groups.
nnmail-crosspost
says whether to use this mechanism or not. Note
that no articles are crossposted to the general (`') group.
nnmh
and nnml
makes crossposts by creating hard links to
the crossposted articles. However, not all 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.
Gnus gives you all the opportunity you could possibly want for shooting yourself in the foot. Let's say you create a group that will contain all the mail you get from your boss. And then you accidentally unsubscribe from the group. Gnus will still put all the mail from your boss in the unsubscribed group, and so, when your boss mails you "Have that report ready by Monday or you're fired!", you'll never see it and, come Tuesday, you'll still believe that you're gainfully employed while you really should be out collecting empty bottles to save up for next month's rent money.
Mail can be gotten from many different sources--the mail spool, from a POP mail server, from a procmail directory, or from a maildir, for instance.
You tell Gnus how to fetch mail by setting mail-sources
(see 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 following mail source types are available:
file
:path
MAIL
environment variable or `/usr/mail/spool/user-name'.
(file :path "/usr/spool/mail/user-name")Or using the default path:
(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 you 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=~/Mail/tmp rm -f $TMP; $MOVEMAIL $MAIL $TMP >/dev/null && cat $TMPAlter this script to fit find the `movemail' you want to use.
directory
:path
:suffix
:predicate
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
(directory :path "/home/user-name/procmail-dir/" :suffix ".prcml")
pop
:server
MAILHOST
environment variable.
:port
:user
:password
:program
format
-like string. Here's an example:
fetchmail %u@%s -P %p %tThe valid format specifier characters are:
:prescript
:program
keyword. This can also be a function to be run.
:postscript
:program
keyword. This can also be a function to be run.
:function
:authentication
password
or the symbol apop
and says what authentication scheme to use. The default is
password
.
:program
and :function
keywords aren't specified,
pop3-movemail
will be used.
Here are some examples. Fetch from the default POP server, using the
default user name, and default fetcher:
(pop)Fetch from a named server with a named user and password:
(pop :server "my.pop.server" :user "user-name" :password "secret")Use `movemail' to move the mail:
(pop :program "movemail po:%u %t %p")
maildir
:path
cur
directory inside the maildir, like in the first example
below.
You can also get mails from remote hosts (because maildirs don't suffer
from locking problems).
(maildir :path "/home/user-name/Maildir/cur")
(maildir :path "/user@remotehost.org:~/Maildir/new")
imap
:server
MAILHOST
environment variable.
:port
:user
:password
:stream
imap-stream-alist
. Right now, this means
`kerberos4', `ssl' or the default `network'.
:authenticator
imap-authenticator-alist
. Right now, this
means `kerberos4', `cram-md5', `anonymous' or the default
`login'.
:mailbox
:predicate
:fetchflag
:dontexpunge
(imap :server "mail.mycorp.com" :stream kerberos4)
webmail
:subtype
hotmail
. The
alternatives are yahoo
, netaddress
, my-deja
.
:user
:password
:dontexpunge
(webmail :subtype 'yahoo :user "user-name" :password "secret")
:plugged
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
mail-source-delete-incoming
nil
, delete incoming files after handling them.
mail-source-directory
nil
.
mail-source-default-file-modes
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 (and the obsolescent nnmail-spool-file
) is
nil
, the mail backends 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 backend, Gnus will slurp all your mail from your inbox and plonk it down in your home directory. Gnus doesn't move any mail if you're not using a mail backend--you have to do a lot of magic invocations first. At the time when you have finished drawing the pentagram, lightened the candles, and sacrificed the goat, you really shouldn't be too surprised when Gnus moves your mail.
These variables are (for the most part) pertinent to all the various mail backends.
nnmail-read-incoming-hook
nnmail-split-hook
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
nnmail-pre-get-new-mail-hook
(is called just before
starting to handle the new mail) and
nnmail-post-get-new-mail-hook
(is called when the mail handling
is done). Here's and example of using these two hooks to change the
default file modes the new mail files get:
(add-hook 'gnus-pre-get-new-mail-hook (lambda () (set-default-file-modes 511))) (add-hook 'gnus-post-get-new-mail-hook (lambda () (set-default-file-modes 551)))
nnmail-use-long-file-names
nil
, the mail backends will use long file and directory
names. Groups like `mail.misc' will end up in directories
(assuming use of nnml
backend) or files (assuming use of
nnfolder
backend) like `mail.misc'. If it is nil
,
the same group will end up in `mail/misc'.
nnmail-delete-file-function
delete-file
by default.
nnmail-cache-accepted-message-ids
nil
, put the Message-ID
s of articles imported into
the backend (via Gcc
, for instance) into the mail duplication
discovery cache. The default is nil
.
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 five possible split syntaxes:
(field value [-
restrict
[...]
]
split)
: If the split is a list, the
first element of which is a string, then store the message as
specified by split, if header field (a regexp) contains
value (also a regexp). 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.
(| 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
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.
(! 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.
value must match a complete word according to the fundamental mode
syntax table. You can use .*
in the regexps to match partial
field names or words. In other words, all value's are wrapped in
`\<' and `\>' pairs.
field and value can also be lisp symbols, in that case they
are expanded as specified by the variable
nnmail-split-abbrev-alist
. This is an alist of cons cells, where
the car
of a cell contains the key, and the cdr
contains the associated
value.
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.
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. Note that, in this case,
there's no cross-posting, as a |
fancy split encloses the
&
split and the catch-all group.
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-mlsplt-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 may be the name
of a group to be used as the 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 select 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 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':
(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),
gnus-group-split-default-catch-all-group
will be set to its
value.
Because you may want to change nnmail-split-fancy
after it is set
by gnus-group-split-update
, this function will run
gnus-group-split-updated-hook
just before finishing.
Most people have lots of old mail stored in various file formats. If you have set up Gnus to read mail using one of the spiffy Gnus mail backends, you'll probably wish to have that old mail incorporated into your mail groups.
Doing so can be quite easy.
To take an example: You're reading mail using nnml
(see 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 backend to another. Just respool all the mail in the old mail groups using the new mail backend.
Traditional mail readers have a tendency to remove mail articles when you mark them as read, in some way. Gnus takes a fundamentally different approach to mail reading.
Gnus basically considers mail just to be news that has been received in a rather peculiar manner. It does not think that it has the power to actually change the mail, or delete any mail messages. If you enter a mail group, and mark articles as "read", or kill them in some other fashion, the mail articles will still exist on the system. I repeat: Gnus will not delete your old, read mail. Unless you ask it to, of course.
To make Gnus get rid of your unwanted mail, you have to mark the articles as expirable. This does not mean that the articles will disappear right away, however. In general, a mail article will be deleted from your system if, 1) it is marked as expirable, AND 2) it is more than one week old. If you do not mark an article as expirable, it will remain on your system until hell freezes over. This bears repeating one more time, with some spurious capitalizations: IF you do NOT mark articles as EXPIRABLE, Gnus will NEVER delete those ARTICLES.
You do not have to mark articles as expirable by hand. Groups that
match the regular expression gnus-auto-expirable-newsgroups
will
have all articles that you read marked as expirable automatically. All
articles 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' 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 groups expirable--only semi-automatic marking of articles as read will mark the articles as expirable in auto-expirable groups.
Let's say you subscribe to a couple of mailing lists, and you want the articles you have read to disappear after a while:
(setq gnus-auto-expirable-newsgroups "mail.nonsense-list\\|mail.nice-list")
Another way to have auto-expiry happen is to have the element
auto-expire
in the group parameters of the group.
If you use adaptive scoring (see 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).
If nnmail-keep-last-article
is non-nil
, Gnus will never
expire the final article in a mail newsgroup. This is to make life
easier for procmail users.
By the way: That line up there, about Gnus never expiring non-expirable
articles, is a lie. If you put total-expire
in the group
parameters, articles will not be marked as expirable, but all read
articles will be put through the expiry process. Use with extreme
caution. Even more dangerous is the
gnus-total-expirable-newsgroups
variable. All groups that match
this regexp will have all read articles put through the expiry process,
which means that all old mail articles in the groups in question
will be deleted after a while. Use with extreme caution, and don't come
crying to me when you discover that the regexp you used matched the
wrong group and all your important mail has disappeared. Be a
man! Or a woman! Whatever you feel more comfortable
with! So there!
Most people make most of their mail groups total-expirable, though.
If gnus-inhibit-user-auto-expire
is non-nil
, user marking
commands will not mark an article as expirable, even if the group has
auto-expire turned on.
Mailers and list servers are notorious for doing all sorts of really,
really stupid things with mail. "Hey, RFC822 doesn't explicitly
prohibit us from adding the string wE aRe ElItE!!!!!1!!
to the
end of all lines passing through our server, so let's do that!!!!1!"
Yes, but RFC822 wasn't designed to be read by morons. Things that were
considered to be self-evident were not discussed. So. Here we are.
Case in point: The German version of Microsoft Exchange adds `AW: ' to the subjects of replies instead of `Re: '. I could pretend to be shocked and dismayed by this, but I haven't got the energy. It is to laugh.
Gnus provides a plethora of functions for washing articles while displaying them, but it might be nicer to do the filtering before storing the mail to disc. For that purpose, we have three hooks and various functions that can be put in these hooks.
nnmail-prepare-incoming-hook
nnheader-ms-strip-cr
nnmail-prepare-incoming-header-hook
nnmail-remove-leading-whitespace
nnmail-remove-list-identifiers
Subject
headers. I'm sure that's nice for
people who use stone age mail readers. This function will remove
strings that match the nnmail-list-identifiers
regexp, which can
also be a list of regexp.
For instance, if you want to remove the `(idm)' and the
`nagnagnag' identifiers:
(setq nnmail-list-identifiers '("(idm)" "nagnagnag"))This can also be done non-destructively with
gnus-list-identifiers
, See section Article Hiding.
nnmail-remove-tabs
nnmail-fix-eudora-headers
References
headers, but OK
In-Reply-To
headers. This function will get rid of the
References
headers.
nnmail-prepare-incoming-message-hook
article-de-quoted-unreadable
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" "duplication of message" "duplicate") ;; Message from daemons, postmaster, and the like to another. (any mail "mail.misc") ;; Other rules. [ ... ] ))
Or something like:
(setq nnmail-split-methods '(("duplicates" "^Gnus-Warning:") ;; Other rules. [...]))
Here's a neat feature: If you know that the recipient reads her mail
with Gnus, and that she has nnmail-treat-duplicates
set to
delete
, you can send her as many insults as you like, just by
using a Message-ID
of a mail that you know that she's already
received. Think of all the fun! She'll never see any of it! Whee!
If you start using any of the mail backends, they have the annoying habit of assuming that you want to read mail with them. This might not be unreasonable, but it might not be what you want.
If you set mail-sources
and nnmail-spool-file
to
nil
, none of the backends will ever attempt to read incoming
mail, which should help.
This might be too much, if, for instance, you are reading mail quite
happily with nnml
and just want to peek at some old RMAIL
file you have stashed away with nnbabyl
. All backends have
variables called backend-get-new-mail
. If you want to disable
the nnbabyl
mail reading, you edit the virtual server for the
group to have a setting where nnbabyl-get-new-mail
to nil
.
All the mail backends will call nn
*-prepare-save-mail-hook
narrowed to the article to be saved before saving it when reading
incoming mail.
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 five different mail backends in the standard Gnus, and more
backends are available separately. The mail backend most people use
(because it is the fastest and most flexible) is nnml
(see section Mail Spool).
The nnmbox backend will use the standard Un*x mbox file to store
mail. nnmbox
will add extra headers to each mail article to say
which group it belongs in.
Virtual server settings:
nnmbox-mbox-file
nnmbox-active-file
nnmbox-get-new-mail
nil
, nnmbox
will read incoming mail and split it
into groups.
The nnbabyl backend will use a babyl mail box (aka. rmail
mbox) to store mail. nnbabyl
will add extra headers to each
mail article to say which group it belongs in.
Virtual server settings:
nnbabyl-mbox-file
nnbabyl-active-file
nnbabyl-get-new-mail
nil
, nnbabyl
will read incoming mail.
The nnml spool mail format isn't compatible with any other known format. It should be used with some caution.
If you use this backend, Gnus will split all incoming mail into files,
one file for each mail, and put the articles into the 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 backend. As each mail gets its own file, you might very well occupy thousands of inodes within a few weeks. If this is no problem for you, and it isn't a problem for you having your friendly systems administrator walking around, madly, shouting "Who is eating all my inodes?! Who? Who!?!", then you should know that this is probably the fastest format to use. You do not have to trudge through a big mbox file just to read your new mail.
nnml
is probably the slowest backend when it comes to article
splitting. It has to create lots of files, and it also generates
NOV databases for the incoming mails. This makes it the fastest
backend when it comes to reading mail.
Virtual server settings:
nnml-directory
nnml
directories will be placed under this directory.
nnml-active-file
nnml
server.
nnml-newsgroups-file
nnml
group descriptions file. See section Newsgroups File Format.
nnml-get-new-mail
nil
, nnml
will read incoming mail.
nnml-nov-is-evil
nil
, this backend will ignore any NOV files.
nnml-nov-file-name
nnml-prepare-save-mail-hook
If your nnml
groups and NOV files get totally out of whack,
you can do a complete update by typing M-x
nnml-generate-nov-databases. This command will trawl through the
entire nnml
hierarchy, looking at each and every article, so it
might take a while to complete. A better interface to this
functionality can be found in the server buffer (see section Server Commands).
nnmh
is just like nnml
, except that is doesn't generate
NOV databases and it doesn't keep an active file. This makes
nnmh
a much slower backend than nnml
, but it also
makes it easier to write procmail scripts for.
Virtual server settings:
nnmh-directory
nnmh
directories will be located under this directory.
nnmh-get-new-mail
nil
, nnmh
will read incoming mail.
nnmh-be-safe
nil
, nnmh
will go to ridiculous lengths to make
sure that the articles in the folder are actually what Gnus thinks they
are. It will check date stamps and stat everything in sight, so
setting this to t
will mean a serious slow-down. If you never
use anything but Gnus to read the nnmh
articles, you do not have
to set this variable to t
.
nnfolder
is a backend for storing each mail group in a separate
file. Each file is in the standard Un*x mbox format. nnfolder
will add extra headers to keep track of article numbers and arrival
dates.
Virtual server settings:
nnfolder-directory
nnfolder
mail boxes will be stored under this directory.
nnfolder-active-file
nnfolder-newsgroups-file
nnfolder-get-new-mail
nil
, nnfolder
will read incoming mail.
nnfolder-save-buffer-hook
nnfolder
buffers. If you
wish to switch this off, you could say something like the following in
your `.emacs' file:
(defun turn-off-backup () (set (make-local-variable 'backup-inhibited) t)) (add-hook 'nnfolder-save-buffer-hook 'turn-off-backup)
nnfolder-delete-mail-hook
If you have lots of nnfolder
-like files you'd like to read with
nnfolder
, you can use the M-x nnfolder-generate-active-file
command to make nnfolder
aware of all likely files in
nnfolder-directory
. This only works if you use long file names,
though.
First, just for terminology, the backend is the common word for a low-level access method--a transport, if you will, by which something is acquired. The sense is that one's mail has to come from somewhere, and so selection of a suitable backend is required in order to get that mail within spitting distance of Gnus.
The same concept exists for Usenet itself: Though access to articles is
typically done by NNTP these days, once upon a midnight dreary, everyone
in the world got at Usenet by running a reader on the machine where the
articles lay (the machine which today we call an NNTP server), and
access was by the reader stepping into the articles' directory spool
area directly. One can still select between either the nntp
or
nnspool
backends, to select between these methods, if one happens
actually to live on the server (or can see its spool directly, anyway,
via NFS).
The goal in selecting a mail backend is to pick one which simultaneously represents a suitable way of dealing with the original format plus leaving mail in a form that is convenient to use in the future. Here are some high and low points on each:
nnmbox
nnbabyl
nnml
nnml
is the backend which smells the most as though you were
actually operating with an nnspool
-accessed Usenet system. (In
fact, I believe nnml
actually derived from nnspool
code,
lo these years ago.) One's mail is taken from the original spool file,
and is then cut up into individual message files, 1:1. It maintains a
Usenet-style active file (analogous to what one finds in an INN- or
CNews-based news system in (for instance) `/var/lib/news/active',
or what is returned via the `NNTP LIST' verb) and also creates
overview files for efficient group entry, as has been defined for
NNTP servers for some years now. It is slower in mail-splitting,
due to the creation of lots of files, updates to the nnml
active
file, and additions to overview files on a per-message basis, but it is
extremely fast on access because of what amounts to the indexing support
provided by the active file and overviews.
nnml
costs inodes in a big way; that is, it soaks up the
resource which defines available places in the filesystem to put new
files. Sysadmins take a dim view of heavy inode occupation within
tight, shared filesystems. But if you live on a personal machine where
the filesystem is your own and space is not at a premium, nnml
wins big.
It is also problematic using this backend if you are living in a
FAT16-based Windows world, since much space will be wasted on all these
tiny files.
nnmh
nnmh
is considered to be semantically equivalent to "nnml
without
active file or overviews". This is arguably the worst choice, because
one gets the slowness of individual file creation married to the
slowness of access parsing when learning what's new in one's groups.
nnfolder
nnfolder
is nnmbox
(the first
method described above) on a per-group basis. That is, nnmbox
itself puts *all* one's mail in one file; nnfolder
provides a
little bit of optimization to this so that each of one's mail groups has
a Unix mail box file. It's faster than nnmbox
because each group
can be parsed separately, and still provides the simple Unix mail box
format requiring minimal effort in moving the mail around. In addition,
it maintains an "active" file making it much faster for Gnus to figure
out how many messages there are in each separate group.
If you have groups that are expected to have a massive amount of
messages, nnfolder
is not the best choice, but if you receive
only a moderate amount of mail, nnfolder
is probably the most
friendly mail backend all over.
Web-based discussion forums are getting more and more popular. On many subjects, the web-based forums have become the most important forums, eclipsing the importance of mailing lists and news groups. The reason is easy to understand--they are friendly to new users; you just point and click, and there's the discussion. With mailing lists, you have to go through a cumbersome subscription procedure, and most people don't even know what a news group is.
The problem with this scenario is that web browsers are not very good at being newsreaders. They do not keep track of what articles you've read; they do not allow you to score on subjects you're interested in; they do not allow off-line browsing; they require you to click around and drive you mad in the end.
So--if web browsers suck at reading discussion forums, why not use Gnus to do it instead?
Gnus has been getting a bit of a collection of backends for providing interfaces to these sources.
The main caveat with all these web sources is that they probably won't work for a very long time. Gleaning information from the HTML data is guesswork at best, and when the layout is altered, the Gnus backend will fail. If you have reasonably new versions of these backends, though, you should be ok.
One thing all these Web methods have in common is that the Web sources are often down, unavailable or just plain too slow to be fun. In those cases, it makes a lot of sense to let the Gnus Agent (see section Gnus Unplugged) handle downloading articles, and then you can read them at leisure from your local disk. No more World Wide Wait for you.
It's, like, too neat to search the Usenet for articles that match a string, but it, like, totally sucks, like, totally, to use one of those, like, Web browsers, and you, like, have to, rilly, like, look at the commercials, so, like, with Gnus you can do rad, rilly, searches without having to use a browser.
The nnweb
backend allows an easy interface to the mighty search
engine. You create an nnweb
group, enter a search pattern, and
then enter the group and read the articles like you would any normal
group. The G w command in the group buffer (see section Foreign Groups) will do this in an easy-to-use fashion.
nnweb
groups don't really lend themselves to being solid
groups--they have a very fleeting idea of article numbers. In fact,
each time you enter an nnweb
group (not even changing the search
pattern), you are likely to get the articles ordered in a different
manner. Not even using duplicate suppression (see section Duplicate Suppression) will help, since nnweb
doesn't even know the
Message-ID
of the articles before reading them using some search
engines (DejaNews, for instance). The only possible way to keep track
of which articles you've read is by scoring on the Date
header--mark all articles posted before the last date you read the
group as read.
If the search engine changes its output substantially, nnweb
won't be able to parse it and will fail. One could hardly fault the Web
providers if they were to do this--their raison d'être is to
make money off of advertisements, not to provide services to the
community. Since nnweb
washes the ads off all the articles, one
might think that the providers might be somewhat miffed. We'll see.
You must have the url
and w3
package installed to be able
to use nnweb
.
Virtual server variables:
nnweb-type
dejanews
, dejanewsold
, altavista
and
reference
.
nnweb-search
nnweb-max-hits
nnweb-type-definition
nnweb
should do
with the various search engine types. The following elements must be
present:
article
map
search
address
id
Message-ID
.
Slashdot (`http://slashdot.org/') is a popular news site, with
lively discussion following the news articles. nnslashdot
will
let you read this forum in a convenient manner.
The easiest way to read this source is to put something like the following in your `.gnus.el' file:
(setq gnus-secondary-select-methods '((nnslashdot "")))
This will make Gnus query the nnslashdot
backend for new comments
and groups. The F command will subscribe each new news article as
a new Gnus group, and you can read the comments by entering these
groups. (Note that the default subscription method is to subscribe new
groups as zombies. Other methods are available (see section Subscription Methods).
If you want to remove an old nnslashdot
group, the G DEL
command is the most handy tool (see section Foreign Groups).
When following up to nnslashdot
comments (or posting new
comments), some light HTMLizations will be performed. In
particular, text quoted with `> ' will be quoted with
blockquote
instead, and signatures will have br
added to
the end of each line. Other than that, you can just write HTML
directly into the message buffer. Note that Slashdot filters out some
HTML forms.
The following variables can be altered to change its behavior:
nnslashdot-threaded
nnslashdot
should display threaded groups or not. The
default is t
. To be able to display threads, nnslashdot
has to retrieve absolutely all comments in a group upon entry. If a
threaded display is not required, nnslashdot
will only retrieve
the comments that are actually wanted by the user. Threading is nicer,
but much, much slower than untreaded.
nnslashdot-login-name
nnslashdot-password
nnslashdot-directory
nnslashdot
will store its files. The default value is
`~/News/slashdot/'.
nnslashdot-active-url
nnslashdot-comments-url
nnslashdot-article-url
nnslashdot-threshold
nnslashdot-group-number
The Ultimate Bulletin Board (`http://www.ultimatebb.com/') is probably the most popular Web bulletin board system used. It has a quite regular and nice interface, and it's possible to get the information Gnus needs to keep groups updated.
The easiest way to get started with nnultimate
is to say
something like the following in the group buffer: B nnultimate RET
http://www.tcj.com/messboard/ubbcgi/ RET. (Substitute the URL
(not including `Ultimate.cgi' or the like at the end) for a forum
you're interested in; there's quite a list of them on the Ultimate web
site.) Then subscribe to the groups you're interested in from the
server buffer, and read them from the group buffer.
The following nnultimate
variables can be altered:
nnultimate-directory
nnultimate
stores its files. The default is
`~/News/ultimate/'.
Some mailing lists only have archives on Web servers, such as `http://www.egroups.com/' and `http://www.mail-archive.com/'. It has a quite regular and nice interface, and it's possible to get the information Gnus needs to keep groups updated.
The easiest way to get started with nnwarchive
is to say
something like the following in the group buffer: M-x
gnus-group-make-nnwarchive-group RET an_egroup RET egroups RET
www.egroups.com RET your@email.address RET. (Substitute the
AN_EGROUP with the mailing list you subscribed, the
YOUR@EMAIL.ADDRESS with your email address.), or to browse the
backend by B nnwarchive RET mail-archive RET.
The following nnwarchive
variables can be altered:
nnwarchive-directory
nnwarchive
stores its files. The default is
`~/News/warchive/'.
nnwarchive-login
nnwarchive-passwd
Gnus can do more than just read news or mail. The methods described below allow Gnus to view directories and files as if they were newsgroups.
If you have a directory that has lots of articles in separate files in it, you might treat it as a newsgroup. The files have to have numerical names, of course.
This might be an opportune moment to mention ange-ftp
(and its
successor efs
), that most wonderful of all wonderful Emacs
packages. When I wrote nndir
, I didn't think much about it--a
backend to read directories. Big deal.
ange-ftp
changes that picture dramatically. For instance, if you
enter the ange-ftp
file name
`/ftp.hpc.uh.edu:/pub/emacs/ding-list/' as the directory name,
ange-ftp
or efs
will actually allow you to read this
directory over at `sina' as a newsgroup. Distributed news ahoy!
nndir
will use NOV files if they are present.
nndir
is a "read-only" backend--you can't delete or expire
articles with this method. You can use nnmh
or nnml
for
whatever you use nndir
for, so you could switch to any of those
methods if you feel the need to have a non-read-only nndir
.
From the nndir
backend (which reads a single spool-like
directory), it's just a hop and a skip to nneething
, which
pretends that any arbitrary directory is a newsgroup. Strange, but
true.
When nneething
is presented with a directory, it will scan this
directory and assign article numbers to each file. When you enter such
a group, nneething
must create "headers" that Gnus can use.
After all, Gnus is a newsreader, in case you're forgetting.
nneething
does this in a two-step process. First, it snoops each
file in question. If the file looks like an article (i.e., the first
few lines look like headers), it will use this as the head. If this is
just some arbitrary file without a head (e.g. a C source file),
nneething
will cobble up a header out of thin air. It will use
file ownership, name and date and do whatever it can with these
elements.
All this should happen automatically for you, and you will be presented with something that looks very much like a newsgroup. Totally like a newsgroup, to be precise. If you select an article, it will be displayed in the article buffer, just as usual.
If you select a line that represents a directory, Gnus will pop you into
a new summary buffer for this nneething
group. And so on. You can
traverse the entire disk this way, if you feel like, but remember that
Gnus is not dired, really, and does not intend to be, either.
There are two overall modes to this action--ephemeral or solid. When
doing the ephemeral thing (i.e., G D from the group buffer), Gnus
will not store information on what files you have read, and what files
are new, and so on. If you create a solid nneething
group the
normal way with G m, Gnus will store a mapping table between
article numbers and file names, and you can treat this group like any
other groups. When you activate a solid nneething
group, you will
be told how many unread articles it contains, etc., etc.
Some variables:
nneething-map-file-directory
nneething
groups will be stored
in this directory, which defaults to `~/.nneething/'.
nneething-exclude-files
nneething-include-files
nil
, only files matching this regexp will be included.
nneething-map-file
nndoc
is a cute little thing that will let you read a single file
as a newsgroup. Several files types are supported:
babyl
mbox
mmdf
news
rnews
forward
nsmail
mime-parts
standard-digest
slack-digest
You can also use the special "file type" guess
, which means
that nndoc
will try to guess what file type it is looking at.
digest
means that nndoc
should guess what digest type the
file is.
nndoc
will not try to change the file or insert any extra headers into
it--it will simply, like, let you use the file as the basis for a
group. And that's it.
If you have some old archived articles that you want to insert into your
new & spiffy Gnus mail backend, nndoc
can probably help you with
that. Say you have an old `RMAIL' file with mail that you now want
to split into your new nnml
groups. You look at that file using
nndoc
(using the G f command in the group buffer
(see section Foreign Groups)), set the process mark on all the articles in
the buffer (M P b, for instance), and then re-spool (B r)
using nnml
. If all goes well, all the mail in the `RMAIL'
file is now also stored in lots of nnml
directories, and you can
delete that pesky `RMAIL' file. If you have the guts!
Virtual server variables:
nndoc-article-type
mbox
, babyl
, digest
,
news
, rnews
, mmdf
, forward
, rfc934
,
rfc822-forward
, mime-parts
, standard-digest
,
slack-digest
, clari-briefs
, nsmail
or guess
.
nndoc-post-type
mail
(the default)
and news
.
Adding new document types to be recognized by nndoc
isn't
difficult. You just have to whip up a definition of what the document
looks like, write a predicate function to recognize that document type,
and then hook into nndoc
.
First, here's an example document type definition:
(mmdf (article-begin . "^\^A\^A\^A\^A\n") (body-end . "^\^A\^A\^A\^A\n"))
The definition is simply a unique name followed by a series of regexp pseudo-variable settings. Below are the possible variables--don't be daunted by the number of variables; most document types can be defined with very few settings:
first-article
nndoc
will skip past all text until it finds
something that match this regexp. All text before this will be
totally ignored.
article-begin
head-begin-function
nndoc-head-begin
nndoc-head-end
body-begin-function
body-begin
body-end-function
body-end
file-end
So, using these variables nndoc
is able to dissect a document
file into a series of articles, each with a head and a body. However, a
few more variables are needed since not all document types are all that
news-like--variables needed to transform the head or the body into
something that's palatable for Gnus:
prepare-body-function
article-transform-function
generate-head-function
Let's look at the most complicated example I can come up with--standard digests:
(standard-digest (first-article . ,(concat "^" (make-string 70 ?-) "\n\n+")) (article-begin . ,(concat "\n\n" (make-string 30 ?-) "\n\n+")) (prepare-body-function . nndoc-unquote-dashes) (body-end-function . nndoc-digest-body-end) (head-end . "^ ?$") (body-begin . "^ ?\n") (file-end . "^End of .*digest.*[0-9].*\n\\*\\*\\|^End of.*Digest *$") (subtype digest guess))
We see that all text before a 70-width line of dashes is ignored; all
text after a line that starts with that `^End of' is also ignored;
each article begins with a 30-width line of dashes; the line separating
the head from the body may contain a single space; and that the body is
run through nndoc-unquote-dashes
before being delivered.
To hook your own document definition into nndoc
, use the
nndoc-add-type
function. It takes two parameters--the first is
the definition itself and the second (optional) parameter says where in
the document type definition alist to put this definition. The alist is
traversed sequentially, and nndoc-TYPE-type-p
is called for a given type TYPE
. So nndoc-mmdf-type-p
is called to see whether a document
is of mmdf
type, and so on. These type predicates should return
nil
if the document is not of the correct type; t
if it is
of the correct type; and a number if the document might be of the
correct type. A high number means high probability; a low number means
low probability with `0' being the lowest valid number.
In the PC world people often talk about "offline" newsreaders. These are thingies that are combined reader/news transport monstrosities. With built-in modem programs. Yecchh!
Of course, us Unix Weenie types of human beans use things like
uucp
and, like, nntpd
and set up proper news and mail
transport things like Ghod intended. And then we just use normal
newsreaders.
However, it can sometimes be convenient to do something that's a bit easier on the brain if you have a very slow modem, and you're not really that interested in doing things properly.
A file format called SOUP has been developed for transporting news and mail from servers to home machines and back again. It can be a bit fiddly.
First some terminology:
awk
program), or you
can use Gnus to create the packet with its SOUP commands (O
s and/or G s b; and then G s p) (see section SOUP Commands).
nnsoup
backend as
the native or secondary server.
So you basically have a bipartite system--you use nnsoup
for
reading and Gnus for packing/sending these SOUP packets.
nnsoup
to take over mail and news.
These are commands for creating and manipulating SOUP packets.
gnus-group-brew-soup
). This command understands the
process/prefix convention.
gnus-soup-save-areas
).
gnus-soup-send-replies
).
gnus-soup-pack-packet
).
nnsoup-pack-replies
).
gnus-soup-add-article
). It understands the process/prefix
convention (see section Process/Prefix).
There are a few variables to customize where Gnus will put all these thingies:
gnus-soup-directory
gnus-soup-replies-directory
gnus-soup-prefix-file
gnus-soup-packer
gnus-soup-unpacker
gnus-soup-packet-directory
gnus-soup-packet-regexp
gnus-soup-packet-directory
.
nnsoup
is the backend for reading SOUP packets. It will
read incoming packets, unpack them, and put them in a directory where
you can read them at leisure.
These are the variables you can use to customize its behavior:
nnsoup-tmp-directory
nnsoup
unpacks a SOUP packet, it does it in this
directory. (`/tmp/' by default.)
nnsoup-directory
nnsoup
then moves each message and index file to this directory.
The default is `~/SOUP/'.
nnsoup-replies-directory
nnsoup-replies-format-type
nnsoup-replies-index-type
nnsoup-active-file
nnsoup
stores lots of information. This is not an "active
file" in the nntp
sense; it's an Emacs Lisp file. If you lose
this file or mess it up in any way, you're dead. The default is
`~/SOUP/active'.
nnsoup-packer
nnsoup-unpacker
nnsoup-packet-directory
nnsoup
will look for incoming packets. The default is
`~/'.
nnsoup-packet-regexp
nnsoup-always-save
nil
, save the replies buffer after each posted message.
Just using nnsoup
won't mean that your postings and mailings end
up in SOUP reply packets automagically. You have to work a bit
more for that to happen.
The nnsoup-set-variables
command will set the appropriate
variables to ensure that all your followups and replies end up in the
SOUP system.
In specific, this is what it does:
(setq message-send-news-function 'nnsoup-request-post) (setq message-send-mail-function 'nnsoup-request-mail)
And that's it, really. If you only want news to go into the SOUP system you just use the first line. If you only want mail to be SOUPed you use the second.
If your local nntp
server doesn't allow posting, for some reason
or other, you can post using one of the numerous mail-to-news gateways.
The nngateway
backend provides the interface.
Note that you can't read anything from this backend--it can only be used to post with.
Server variables:
nngateway-address
nngateway-header-transformation
nngateway-simple-header-transformation
. The function is called
narrowed to the headers to be transformed and with one parameter--the
gateway address.
This default function just inserts a new To
header based on the
Newsgroups
header and the gateway address.
For instance, an article with this Newsgroups
header:
Newsgroups: alt.religion.emacswill get this
From
header inserted:
To: alt-religion-emacs@GATEWAYThe following pre-defined functions exist:
nngateway-simple-header-transformation
To
header that looks like
newsgroup@nngateway-address
.
nngateway-mail2news-header-transformation
To
header that looks like
nngateway-address
.
Here's an example:
(setq gnus-post-method '(nngateway "mail2news@replay.com" (nngateway-header-transformation nngateway-mail2news-header-transformation)))
So, to use this, simply say something like:
(setq gnus-post-method '(nngateway "GATEWAY.ADDRESS"))
IMAP is a network protocol for reading mail (or news, or ...), think of it as a modernized NNTP. Connecting to a IMAP server is much similar to connecting to a news server, you just specify the network address of the server.
The following variables can be used to create a virtual nnimap
server:
nnimap-address
nnimap-server-port
nnimap-list-pattern
("INBOX" "Mail/*" "alt.sex.*" ("~friend/Mail/" . "list/*"))
nnimap-stream
nnimap-authenticator
nnimap-expunge-on-close
Deleted
which doesn't actually
delete them, and this (marking them Deleted
, that is) is what
nnimap does when you delete a article in Gnus (with G DEL or
similair).
Since the articles aren't really removed when we mark them with the
Deleted
flag we'll need a way to actually delete them. Feel like
running in circles yet?
Traditionally, nnimap has removed all articles marked as Deleted
when closing a mailbox but this is now configurable by this server
variable.
The possible options are:
always
never
ask
Splitting is something Gnus users has loved and used for years, and now the rest of the world is catching up. Yeah, dream on, not many IMAP server has server side splitting and those that have splitting seem to use some non-standard protocol. This means that IMAP support for Gnus has to do it's own splitting.
And it does.
Here are the variables of interest:
nnimap-split-crosspost
nnimap-split-rule
found will be used.
Nnmail equivalent: nnmail-crosspost
.
nnimap-split-inbox
(setq nnimap-split-inbox '("INBOX" ("~/friend/Mail" . "lists/*") "lists.imap"))No nnmail equivalent.
nnimap-split-rule
nnimap-split-inbox
will be split according to
this variable.
This variable contains a list of lists, where the first element in the
sublist gives the name of the IMAP mailbox to move articles
matching the regexp in the second element in the sublist. Got that?
Neither did I, we need examples.
(setq nnimap-split-rule '(("INBOX.nnimap" "^Sender: owner-nnimap@vic20.globalcom.se") ("INBOX.junk" "^Subject:.*MAKE MONEY") ("INBOX.private" "")))This will put all articles from the nnimap mailing list into mailbox INBOX.nnimap, all articles containing MAKE MONEY in the Subject: line into INBOX.spam and everything else in INBOX.private. The first string may contain `\\1' forms, like the ones used by replace-match to insert sub-expressions from the matched text. For instance:
("INBOX.lists.\\1" "^Sender: owner-\\([a-z-]+\\)@")The second element can also be a function. In that case, it will be called with the first element of the rule as the argument, in a buffer containing the headers of the article. It should return a non-nil value if it thinks that the mail belongs in that group. Nnmail users might recollect that the last regexp had to be empty to match all articles (like in the example above). This is not required in nnimap. Articles not matching any of the regexps will not be moved out of your inbox. (This might might affect performance if you keep lots of unread articles in your inbox, since the splitting code would go over them every time you fetch new mail.) These rules are processed from the beginning of the alist toward the end. The first rule to make a match will "win", unless you have crossposting enabled. In that case, all matching rules will "win". This variable can also have a function as its value, the function will be called with the headers narrowed and should return a group where it thinks the article should be splitted to. The splitting code tries to create mailboxes if it need too. Nnmail equivalent:
nnmail-split-methods
.
nnimap-split-fancy
nnimap-split-rule
to
nnmail-split-fancy
if you want to use fancy
splitting. See section Fancy Mail Splitting.
However, to be able to have different fancy split rules for nnmail and
nnimap backends you can set nnimap-split-rule
to
nnimap-split-fancy
and define the nnimap specific fancy split
rule in nnimap-split-fancy
.
Example:
(setq nnimap-split-rule 'nnimap-split-fancy nnimap-split-fancy ...)Nnmail equivalent:
nnmail-split-fancy
.
ACL stands for Access Control List. ACLs are used in IMAP for limiting (or enabling) other users access to your mail boxes. Not all IMAP servers support this, this function will give an error if it doesn't.
To edit a ACL for a mailbox, type G l
(gnus-group-edit-nnimap-acl
) and you'll be presented with a ACL
editing window with detailed instructions.
Some possible uses:
If you're using the never
setting of nnimap-expunge-close
,
you may want the option of expunging all deleted articles in a mailbox
manually. This is exactly what G x does.
Currently there is no way of showing deleted articles, you can just delete them.
Gnus allows combining a mixture of all the other group types into bigger groups.
An nnvirtual group is really nothing more than a collection of other groups.
For instance, if you are tired of reading many small groups, you can put them all in one big group, and then grow tired of reading one big, unwieldy group. The joys of computing!
You specify nnvirtual
as the method. The address should be a
regexp to match component groups.
All marks in the virtual group will stick to the articles in the component groups. So if you tick an article in a virtual group, the article will also be ticked in the component group from whence it came. (And vice versa--marks from the component groups will also be shown in the virtual group.)
Here's an example nnvirtual
method that collects all Andrea Dworkin
newsgroups into one, big, happy newsgroup:
(nnvirtual "^alt\\.fan\\.andrea-dworkin$\\|^rec\\.dworkin.*")
The component groups can be native or foreign; everything should work smoothly, but if your computer explodes, it was probably my fault.
Collecting the same group from several servers might actually be a good idea if users have set the Distribution header to limit distribution. If you would like to read `soc.motss' both from a server in Japan and a server in Norway, you could use the following as the group regexp:
"^nntp\\+server\\.jp:soc\\.motss$\\|^nntp\\+server\\.no:soc\\.motss$"
(Remember, though, that if you're creating the group with G m, you shouldn't double the backslashes, and you should leave off the quote characters at the beginning and the end of the string.)
This should work kinda smoothly--all articles from both groups should end up in this one, and there should be no duplicates. Threading (and the rest) will still work as usual, but there might be problems with the sequence of articles. Sorting on date might be an option here (see section Selecting a Group).
One limitation, however--all groups included in a virtual
group have to be alive (i.e., subscribed or unsubscribed). Killed or
zombie groups can't be component groups for nnvirtual
groups.
If the nnvirtual-always-rescan
is non-nil
,
nnvirtual
will always scan groups for unread articles when
entering a virtual group. If this variable is nil
(which is the
default) and you read articles in a component group after the virtual
group has been activated, the read articles from the component group
will show up when you enter the virtual group. You'll also see this
effect if you have two virtual groups that have a component group in
common. If that's the case, you should set this variable to t
.
Or you can just tap M-g
on the virtual group every time before
you enter it--it'll have much the same effect.
nnvirtual
can have both mail and news groups as component groups.
When responding to articles in nnvirtual
groups, nnvirtual
has to ask the backend of the component group the article comes from
whether it is a news or mail backend. However, when you do a ^,
there is typically no sure way for the component backend to know this,
and in that case nnvirtual
tells Gnus that the article came from a
not-news backend. (Just to be on the safe side.)
C-c C-t in the message buffer will insert the Newsgroups
line from the article you respond to in these cases.
Kibozing is defined by OED as "grepping through (parts of)
the news feed". nnkiboze
is a backend that will do this for
you. Oh joy! Now you can grind any NNTP server down to a halt
with useless requests! Oh happiness!
To create a kibozed group, use the G k command in the group buffer.
The address field of the nnkiboze
method is, as with
nnvirtual
, a regexp to match groups to be "included" in the
nnkiboze
group. That's where most similarities between nnkiboze
and nnvirtual
end.
In addition to this regexp detailing component groups, an nnkiboze
group
must have a score file to say what articles are to be included in
the group (see section Scoring).
You must run M-x nnkiboze-generate-groups after creating the
nnkiboze
groups you want to have. This command will take time. Lots of
time. Oodles and oodles of time. Gnus has to fetch the headers from
all the articles in all the component groups and run them through the
scoring process to determine if there are any articles in the groups
that are to be part of the nnkiboze
groups.
Please limit the number of component groups by using restrictive regexps. Otherwise your sysadmin may become annoyed with you, and the NNTP site may throw you off and never let you back in again. Stranger things have happened.
nnkiboze
component groups do not have to be alive--they can be dead,
and they can be foreign. No restrictions.
The generation of an nnkiboze
group means writing two files in
nnkiboze-directory
, which is `~/News/' by default. One
contains the NOV header lines for all the articles in the group,
and the other is an additional `.newsrc' file to store information
on what groups have been searched through to find component articles.
Articles marked as read in the nnkiboze
group will have
their NOV lines removed from the NOV file.
In olden times (ca. February '88), people used to run their newsreaders on big machines with permanent connections to the net. News transport was dealt with by news servers, and all the newsreaders had to do was to read news. Believe it or not.
Nowadays most people read news and mail at home, and use some sort of modem to connect to the net. To avoid running up huge phone bills, it would be nice to have a way to slurp down all the news and mail, hang up the phone, read for several hours, and then upload any responses you have to make. And then you repeat the procedure.
Of course, you can use news servers for doing this as well. I've used
inn
together with slurp
, pop
and sendmail
for some years, but doing that's a bore. Moving the news server
functionality up to the newsreader makes sense if you're the only person
reading news on a machine.
Using Gnus as an "offline" newsreader is quite simple.
(gnus-agentize)
That's it. Gnus is now an "offline" newsreader.
Of course, to use it as such, you have to learn a few new commands.
cron
job.
First, let's get some terminology out of the way.
The Gnus Agent is said to be unplugged when you have severed the connection to the net (and notified the Agent that this is the case). When the connection to the net is up again (and Gnus knows this), the Agent is plugged.
The local machine is the one you're running on, and which isn't connected to the net continuously.
Downloading means fetching things from the net to your local machine. Uploading is doing the opposite.
Let's take a typical Gnus session using the Agent.
gnus-unplugged
. This brings up the Gnus
Agent in a disconnected state. You can read all the news that you have
already fetched while in this mode.
Here are some things you should do the first time (or so) that you use the Agent.
One of the main reasons to integrate the news transport layer into the newsreader is to allow greater control over what articles to download. There's not much point in downloading huge amounts of articles, just to find out that you're not interested in reading any of them. It's better to be somewhat more conservative in choosing what to download, and then mark the articles for downloading manually if it should turn out that you're interested in the articles anyway.
The main way to control what is to be downloaded is to create a
category and then assign some (or all) groups to this category.
Groups that do not belong in any other category belong to the
default
category. Gnus has its own buffer for creating and
managing categories.
A category consists of two things.
A predicate in its simplest form can be a single predicate such as
true
or false
. These two will download every available
article or nothing respectively. In the case of these two special
predicates an additional score rule is superfluous.
Predicates of high
or low
download articles in respect of
their scores in relationship to gnus-agent-high-score
and
gnus-agent-low-score
as descibed below.
To gain even finer control of what is to be regarded eligible for download a predicate can consist of a number of predicates with logical operators sprinkled in between.
Perhaps some examples are in order.
Here's a simple predicate. (It's the default predicate, in fact, used for all groups that don't belong to any other category.)
short
Quite simple, eh? This predicate is true if and only if the article is short (for some value of "short").
Here's a more complex predicate:
(or high (and (not low) (not long)))
This means that an article should be downloaded if it has a high score, or if the score is not low and the article is not long. You get the drift.
The available logical operators are or
, and
and
not
. (If you prefer, you can use the more "C"-ish operators
`|', &
and !
instead.)
The following predicates are pre-defined, but if none of these fit what you want to do, you can write your own.
short
gnus-agent-short-article
lines; default 100.
long
gnus-agent-long-article
lines; default 200.
low
gnus-agent-low-score
; default 0.
high
gnus-agent-high-score
; default 0.
spam
true
false
If you want to create your own predicate function, here's what you have
to know: The functions are called with no parameters, but the
gnus-headers
and gnus-score
dynamic variables are bound to
useful values.
For example, you could decide that you don't want to download articles
that were posted more than a certain number of days ago (e.g. posted
more than gnus-agent-expire-days
ago) you might write a function
something along the lines of the following:
(defun my-article-old-p () "Say whether an article is old." (< (time-to-days (date-to-time (mail-header-date gnus-headers))) (- (time-to-days (current-time)) gnus-agent-expire-days)))
with the predicate then defined as:
(not my-article-old-p)
or you could append your predicate to the predefined
gnus-category-predicate-alist
in your `~/.gnus.el' or
wherever. (Note: this would have to be at a point *after*
gnus-agent
has been loaded via (gnus-agentize)
)
(defvar gnus-category-predicate-alist (append gnus-category-predicate-alist '((old . my-article-old-p))))
and simply specify your predicate as:
(not old)
If/when using something like the above, be aware that there are many misconfigured systems/mailers out there and so an article's date is not always a reliable indication of when it was posted. Hell, some people just don't give a damm.
The above predicates apply to *all* the groups which belong to the category. However, if you wish to have a specific predicate for an individual group within a category, or you're just too lazy to set up a new category, you can enter a group's individual predicate in it's group parameters like so:
(agent-predicate . short)
This is the group parameter equivalent of the agent category default.
Note that when specifying a single word predicate like this, the
agent-predicate
specification must be in dotted pair notation.
The equivalent of the longer example from above would be:
(agent-predicate or high (and (not low) (not long)))
The outer parenthesis required in the category specification are not entered here as, not being in dotted pair notation, the value of the predicate is assumed to be a list.
Now, the syntax of the download score is the same as the syntax of
normal score files, except that all elements that require actually
seeing the article itself are verboten. This means that only the
following headers can be scored on: Subject
, From
,
Date
, Message-ID
, References
, Chars
,
Lines
, and Xref
.
As with predicates, the specification of the download score rule
to use in respect of a group can be in either the category definition if
it's to be applicable to all groups in therein, or a group's parameters
if it's to be specific to that group.
In both of these places the download score rule
can take one of
three forms:
(("from" ("Lars Ingebrigtsen" 1000000 nil s)) ("lines" (500 -100 nil <)))
(agent-score ("from" ("Lars Ingebrigtsen" 1000000 nil s)) ("lines" (500 -100 nil <)))Again, note the omission of the outermost parenthesis here.
("~/News/agent.SCORE")or perhaps
("~/News/agent.SCORE" "~/News/agent.group.SCORE")
(agent-score "~/News/agent.SCORE")Additional score files can be specified as above. Need I say anything about parenthesis?
normal
score files
If you dont want to maintain two sets of scoring rules for a group, and
your desired downloading
criteria for a group are the same as your
reading
criteria then you can tell the agent to refer to your
normal
score files when deciding what to download.
These directives in either the category definition or a group's
parameters will cause the agent to read in all the applicable score
files for a group, *filtering out* those those sections that do not
relate to one of the permitted subset of scoring keywords.
file
(agent-score . file)
You'd normally do all category maintenance from the category buffer.
When you enter it for the first time (with the J c command from
the group buffer), you'll only see the default
category.
The following commands are available in this buffer:
gnus-category-exit
).
gnus-category-kill
).
gnus-category-copy
).
gnus-category-add
).
gnus-category-edit-predicate
).
gnus-category-edit-groups
).
gnus-category-edit-score
).
gnus-category-list
).
gnus-category-mode-hook
gnus-category-line-format
gnus-category-mode-line-format
gnus-agent-short-article
gnus-agent-long-article
gnus-agent-low-score
gnus-agent-high-score
All the Gnus Agent commands are on the J submap. The J j
(gnus-agent-toggle-plugged
command works in all modes, and
toggles the plugged/unplugged state of the Gnus Agent.
You can run a complete batch fetch from the command line with the following incantation:
$ emacs -batch -l ~/.gnus.el -f gnus-agent-batch-fetch
gnus-agent-fetch-groups
).
gnus-enter-category-buffer
).
gnus-agent-fetch-session
).
gnus-group-send-drafts
). See section Drafts.
gnus-agent-add-group
). This command understands the
process/prefix convention (see section Process/Prefix).
gnus-agent-remove-group
). This command understands the
process/prefix convention (see section Process/Prefix).
gnus-agent-mark-article
).
gnus-agent-unmark-article
).
gnus-agent-toggle-mark
).
gnus-agent-catchup
).
gnus-agent-add-server
).
gnus-agent-remove-server
).
nnagent
doesn't handle expiry. Instead, there's a special
gnus-agent-expire
command that will expire all read articles that
are older than gnus-agent-expire-days
days. It can be run
whenever you feel that you're running out of space. It's not
particularly fast or efficient, and it's not a particularly good idea to
interrupt it (with C-g or anything else) once you've started it.
if gnus-agent-expire-all
is non-nil
, this command will
expire all articles--unread, read, ticked and dormant. If nil
(which is the default), only read articles are eligible for expiry, and
unread, ticked and dormant articles will be kept indefinitely.
When Gnus is unplugged, all outgoing messages (both mail and news) are stored in the draft groups (see section Drafts). You can view them there after posting, and edit them at will.
When Gnus is plugged again, you can send the messages either from the draft group with the special commands available there, or you can use the J S command in the group buffer to send all the sendable messages in the draft group.
gnus-agent-directory
gnus-agent-handle-level
gnus-level-subscribed
,
which means that only subscribed group will be considered by the Agent
by default.
gnus-agent-plugged-hook
gnus-agent-unplugged-hook
If you don't want to read this manual, and you have a fairly standard setup, you may be able to use something like the following as your `.gnus.el' file to get started.
;;; Define how Gnus is to fetch news. We do this over NNTP ;;; from your ISP's server. (setq gnus-select-method '(nntp "news.your-isp.com")) ;;; Define how Gnus is to read your mail. We read mail from ;;; your ISP's POP server. (setq mail-sources '((pop :server "pop.your-isp.com"))) ;;; Say how Gnus is to store the mail. We use nnml groups. (setq gnus-secondary-select-methods '((nnml ""))) ;;; Make Gnus into an offline newsreader. (gnus-agentize)
That should be it, basically. Put that in your `~/.gnus.el' file, edit to suit your needs, start up PPP (or whatever), and type M-x gnus.
If this is the first time you've run Gnus, you will be subscribed automatically to a few default newsgroups. You'll probably want to subscribe to more groups, and to do that, you have to query the NNTP server for a complete list of groups with the A A command. This usually takes quite a while, but you only have to do it once.
After reading and parsing a while, you'll be presented with a list of groups. Subscribe to the ones you want to read with the u command. l to make all the killed groups disappear after you've subscribe to all the groups you want to read. (A k will bring back all the killed groups.)
You can now read the groups at once, or you can download the articles with the J s command. And then read the rest of this manual to find out which of the other gazillion things you want to customize.
Having the Gnus Agent fetch articles (and post whatever messages you've written) is quite easy once you've gotten things set up properly. The following shell script will do everything that is necessary:
#!/bin/sh emacs -batch -l ~/.emacs -f gnus-agent-batch >/dev/null
The Gnus Agent doesn't seem to work like most other offline newsreaders. Here are some common questions that some imaginary people may ask:
In short, when Gnus is unplugged, it only looks into the locally stored articles; when it's plugged, it only talks to your ISP.
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