11.2 History

GNUS was written by Masanobu UMEDA. When autumn crept up in ’94, Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen grew bored and decided to rewrite Gnus.

If you want to investigate the person responsible for this outrage, you can point your (feh!) web browser to http://quimby.gnus.org/. This is also the primary distribution point for the new and spiffy versions of Gnus, and is known as The Site That Destroys Newsrcs And Drives People Mad.

During the first extended alpha period of development, the new Gnus was called “(ding) Gnus”. (ding) is, of course, short for ding is not Gnus, which is a total and utter lie, but who cares? (Besides, the “Gnus” in this abbreviation should probably be pronounced “news” as UMEDA intended, which makes it a more appropriate name, don’t you think?)

In any case, after spending all that energy on coming up with a new and spunky name, we decided that the name was too spunky, so we renamed it back again to “Gnus”. But in mixed case. “Gnus” vs. “GNUS”. New vs. old.

11.2.1 Gnus Versions

The first “proper” release of Gnus 5 was done in November 1995 when it was included in the Emacs 19.30 distribution (132 (ding) Gnus releases plus 15 Gnus 5.0 releases).

In May 1996 the next Gnus generation (aka. “September Gnus” (after 99 releases)) was released under the name “Gnus 5.2” (40 releases).

On July 28th 1996 work on Red Gnus was begun, and it was released on January 25th 1997 (after 84 releases) as “Gnus 5.4” (67 releases).

On September 13th 1997, Quassia Gnus was started and lasted 37 releases. It was released as “Gnus 5.6” on March 8th 1998 (46 releases).

Gnus 5.6 begat Pterodactyl Gnus on August 29th 1998 and was released as “Gnus 5.8” (after 99 releases and a CVS repository) on December 3rd 1999.

On the 26th of October 2000, Oort Gnus was begun and was released as Gnus 5.10 on May 1st 2003 (24 releases).

On the January 4th 2004, No Gnus was begun.

On April 19, 2010 Gnus development was moved to Git. See http://git.gnus.org for details (http://www.gnus.org will be updated with the information when possible).

On the January 31th 2012, Ma Gnus was begun.

If you happen upon a version of Gnus that has a prefixed name—“(ding) Gnus”, “September Gnus”, “Red Gnus”, “Quassia Gnus”, “Pterodactyl Gnus”, “Oort Gnus”, “No Gnus”, “Ma Gnus”—don’t panic. Don’t let it know that you’re frightened. Back away. Slowly. Whatever you do, don’t run. Walk away, calmly, until you’re out of its reach. Find a proper released version of Gnus and snuggle up to that instead.

11.2.2 Why?

What’s the point of Gnus?

I want to provide a “rad”, “happening”, “way cool” and “hep” newsreader, that lets you do anything you can think of. That was my original motivation, but while working on Gnus, it has become clear to me that this generation of newsreaders really belong in the stone age. Newsreaders haven’t developed much since the infancy of the net. If the volume continues to rise with the current rate of increase, all current newsreaders will be pretty much useless. How do you deal with newsgroups that have thousands of new articles each day? How do you keep track of millions of people who post?

Gnus offers no real solutions to these questions, but I would very much like to see Gnus being used as a testing ground for new methods of reading and fetching news. Expanding on UMEDA-san’s wise decision to separate the newsreader from the back ends, Gnus now offers a simple interface for anybody who wants to write new back ends for fetching mail and news from different sources. I have added hooks for customizations everywhere I could imagine it being useful. By doing so, I’m inviting every one of you to explore and invent.

May Gnus never be complete. C-u 100 M-x all-hail-emacs and C-u 100 M-x all-hail-xemacs.

11.2.3 Compatibility

Gnus was designed to be fully compatible with GNUS. Almost all key bindings have been kept. More key bindings have been added, of course, but only in one or two obscure cases have old bindings been changed.

Our motto is:

In a cloud bones of steel.

All commands have kept their names. Some internal functions have changed their names.

The gnus-uu package has changed drastically. See section Decoding Articles.

One major compatibility question is the presence of several summary buffers. All variables relevant while reading a group are buffer-local to the summary buffer they belong in. Although many important variables have their values copied into their global counterparts whenever a command is executed in the summary buffer, this change might lead to incorrect values being used unless you are careful.

All code that relies on knowledge of GNUS internals will probably fail. To take two examples: Sorting gnus-newsrc-alist (or changing it in any way, as a matter of fact) is strictly verboten. Gnus maintains a hash table that points to the entries in this alist (which speeds up many functions), and changing the alist directly will lead to peculiar results.

Old hilit19 code does not work at all. In fact, you should probably remove all hilit code from all Gnus hooks (gnus-group-prepare-hook and gnus-summary-prepare-hook). Gnus provides various integrated functions for highlighting. These are faster and more accurate. To make life easier for everybody, Gnus will by default remove all hilit calls from all hilit hooks. Uncleanliness! Away!

Packages like expire-kill will no longer work. As a matter of fact, you should probably remove all old GNUS packages (and other code) when you start using Gnus. More likely than not, Gnus already does what you have written code to make GNUS do. (Snicker.)

Even though old methods of doing things are still supported, only the new methods are documented in this manual. If you detect a new method of doing something while reading this manual, that does not mean you have to stop doing it the old way.

Gnus understands all GNUS startup files.

Overall, a casual user who hasn’t written much code that depends on GNUS internals should suffer no problems. If problems occur, please let me know by issuing that magic command M-x gnus-bug.

If you are in the habit of sending bug reports very often, you may find the helpful help buffer annoying after a while. If so, set gnus-bug-create-help-buffer to nil to avoid having it pop up at you.

11.2.4 Conformity

No rebels without a clue here, ma’am. We conform to all standards known to (wo)man. Except for those standards and/or conventions we disagree with, of course.

RFC (2)822

There are no known breaches of this standard.

RFC 1036

There are no known breaches of this standard, either.

Son-of-RFC 1036

We do have some breaches to this one.

X-Newsreader

User-Agent

These are considered to be “vanity headers”, while I consider them to be consumer information. After seeing so many badly formatted articles coming from tin and Netscape I know not to use either of those for posting articles. I would not have known that if it wasn’t for the X-Newsreader header.

USEFOR

USEFOR is an IETF working group writing a successor to RFC 1036, based on Son-of-RFC 1036. They have produced a number of drafts proposing various changes to the format of news articles. The Gnus towers will look into implementing the changes when the draft is accepted as an RFC.

MIME—RFC 2045–2049 etc

All the various MIME RFCs are supported.

Disposition Notifications—RFC 2298

Message Mode is able to request notifications from the receiver.

PGP—RFC 1991 and RFC 2440

RFC 1991 is the original PGP message specification, published as an informational RFC. RFC 2440 was the follow-up, now called Open PGP, and put on the Standards Track. Both document a non-MIME aware PGP format. Gnus supports both encoding (signing and encryption) and decoding (verification and decryption).

PGP/MIME—RFC 2015/3156

RFC 2015 (superseded by 3156 which references RFC 2440 instead of RFC 1991) describes the MIME-wrapping around the RFC 1991/2440 format. Gnus supports both encoding and decoding.

S/MIME—RFC 2633

RFC 2633 describes the S/MIME format.

IMAP—RFC 1730/2060, RFC 2195, RFC 2086, RFC 2359, RFC 2595, RFC 1731

RFC 1730 is IMAP version 4, updated somewhat by RFC 2060 (IMAP 4 revision 1). RFC 2195 describes CRAM-MD5 authentication for IMAP. RFC 2086 describes access control lists (ACLs) for IMAP. RFC 2359 describes a IMAP protocol enhancement. RFC 2595 describes the proper TLS integration (STARTTLS) with IMAP. RFC 1731 describes the GSSAPI/Kerberos4 mechanisms for IMAP.

If you ever notice Gnus acting non-compliant with regards to the texts mentioned above, don’t hesitate to drop a note to Gnus Towers and let us know.

11.2.5 Emacsen

This version of Gnus should work on:

• Emacs 23.1 and up.
• XEmacs 21.4 and up.

This Gnus version will absolutely not work on any Emacsen older than that. Not reliably, at least. Older versions of Gnus may work on older Emacs versions. Particularly, Gnus 5.10.8 should also work on Emacs 20.7 and XEmacs 21.1.

11.2.6 Gnus Development

Gnus is developed in a two-phased cycle. The first phase involves much discussion on the development mailing list ‘ding@gnus.org’, where people propose changes and new features, post patches and new back ends. This phase is called the alpha phase, since the Gnusae released in this phase are alpha releases, or (perhaps more commonly in other circles) snapshots. During this phase, Gnus is assumed to be unstable and should not be used by casual users. Gnus alpha releases have names like “Oort Gnus” and “No Gnus”. See section Gnus Versions.

After futzing around for 10–100 alpha releases, Gnus is declared frozen, and only bug fixes are applied. Gnus loses the prefix, and is called things like “Gnus 5.10.1” instead. Normal people are supposed to be able to use these, and these are mostly discussed on the ‘gnu.emacs.gnus’ newsgroup. This newgroup is mirrored to the mailing list ‘info-gnus-english@gnu.org’ which is carried on Gmane as ‘gmane.emacs.gnus.user’. These releases are finally integrated in Emacs.

Some variable defaults differ between alpha Gnusae and released Gnusae, in particular, mail-source-delete-incoming. This is to prevent lossage of mail if an alpha release hiccups while handling the mail. See section Mail Source Customization.

The division of discussion between the ding mailing list and the Gnus newsgroup is not purely based on publicity concerns. It’s true that having people write about the horrible things that an alpha Gnus release can do (sometimes) in a public forum may scare people off, but more importantly, talking about new experimental features that have been introduced may confuse casual users. New features are frequently introduced, fiddled with, and judged to be found wanting, and then either discarded or totally rewritten. People reading the mailing list usually keep up with these rapid changes, while people on the newsgroup can’t be assumed to do so.

So if you have problems with or questions about the alpha versions, direct those to the ding mailing list ‘ding@gnus.org’. This list is also available on Gmane as ‘gmane.emacs.gnus.general’.

Some variable defaults differ between alpha Gnusae and released Gnusae, in particular, mail-source-delete-incoming. This is to prevent lossage of mail if an alpha release hiccups while handling the mail. See section Mail Source Customization.

11.2.7 Contributors

The new Gnus version couldn’t have been done without the help of all the people on the (ding) mailing list. Every day for over a year I have gotten billions of nice bug reports from them, filling me with joy, every single one of them. Smooches. The people on the list have been tried beyond endurance, what with my “oh, that’s a neat idea <type type>, yup, I’ll release it right away <ship off> no wait, that doesn’t work at all <type type>, yup, I’ll ship that one off right away <ship off> no, wait, that absolutely does not work” policy for releases. Micro$oft—bah. Amateurs. I’m much worse. (Or is that “worser”? “much worser”? “worsest”?)

I would like to take this opportunity to thank the Academy for… oops, wrong show.

• Masanobu UMEDA—the writer of the original GNUS.
• Shenghuo Zhu—uudecode.el, mm-uu.el, rfc1843.el, nnwarchive and many, many other things connected with MIME and other types of en/decoding, as well as general bug fixing, new functionality and stuff.
• Per Abrahamsen—custom, scoring, highlighting and SOUP code (as well as numerous other things).
• Luis Fernandes—design and graphics.
• Joe Reiss—creator of the smiley faces.
• Justin Sheehy—the FAQ maintainer.
• Erik Naggum—help, ideas, support, code and stuff.
• Wes Hardaker—‘gnus-picon.el’ and the manual section on picons (see section Picons).
• Kim-Minh Kaplan—further work on the picon code.
• Brad Miller—‘gnus-gl.el’ and the GroupLens manual section.
• Sudish Joseph—innumerable bug fixes.
• Ilja Weis—‘gnus-topic.el’.
• Steven L. Baur—lots and lots and lots of bug detection and fixes.
• Vladimir Alexiev—the refcard and reference booklets.
• Felix Lee & Jamie Zawinski—I stole some pieces from the XGnus distribution by Felix Lee and JWZ.
• Scott Byer—‘nnfolder.el’ enhancements & rewrite.
• Peter Mutsaers—orphan article scoring code.
• Ken Raeburn—POP mail support.
• Hallvard B Furuseth—various bits and pieces, especially dealing with .newsrc files.
• Brian Edmonds—‘gnus-bbdb.el’.
• David Moore—rewrite of ‘nnvirtual.el’ and many other things.
• Kevin Davidson—came up with the name ding, so blame him.
• François Pinard—many, many interesting and thorough bug reports, as well as autoconf support.

This manual was proof-read by Adrian Aichner, with Ricardo Nassif, Mark Borges, and Jost Krieger proof-reading parts of the manual.

The following people have contributed many patches and suggestions:

Christopher Davis, Andrew Eskilsson, Kai Grossjohann, Kevin Greiner, Jesper Harder, Paul Jarc, Simon Josefsson, David Kågedal, Richard Pieri, Fabrice Popineau, Daniel Quinlan, Michael Shields, Reiner Steib, Jason L. Tibbitts, III, Jack Vinson, Katsumi Yamaoka, and Teodor Zlatanov.

Also thanks to the following for patches and stuff:

Jari Aalto, Adrian Aichner, Vladimir Alexiev, Russ Allbery, Peter Arius, Matt Armstrong, Marc Auslander, Miles Bader, Alexei V. Barantsev, Frank Bennett, Robert Bihlmeyer, Chris Bone, Mark Borges, Mark Boyns, Lance A. Brown, Rob Browning, Kees de Bruin, Martin Buchholz, Joe Buehler, Kevin Buhr, Alastair Burt, Joao Cachopo, Zlatko Calusic, Massimo Campostrini, Castor, David Charlap, Dan Christensen, Kevin Christian, Jae-you Chung, James H. Cloos, Jr., Laura Conrad, Michael R. Cook, Glenn Coombs, Andrew J. Cosgriff, Neil Crellin, Frank D. Cringle, Geoffrey T. Dairiki, Andre Deparade, Ulrik Dickow, Dave Disser, Rui-Tao Dong, Joev Dubach, Michael Welsh Duggan, Dave Edmondson, Paul Eggert, Mark W. Eichin, Karl Eichwalder, Enami Tsugutomo, Michael Ernst, Luc Van Eycken, Sam Falkner, Nelson Jose dos Santos Ferreira, Sigbjorn Finne, Sven Fischer, Paul Fisher, Decklin Foster, Gary D. Foster, Paul Franklin, Guy Geens, Arne Georg Gleditsch, David S. Goldberg, Michelangelo Grigni, Dale Hagglund, D. Hall, Magnus Hammerin, Kenichi Handa, Raja R. Harinath, Yoshiki Hayashi, P. E. Jareth Hein, Hisashige Kenji, Scott Hofmann, Tassilo Horn, Marc Horowitz, Gunnar Horrigmo, Richard Hoskins, Brad Howes, Miguel de Icaza, François Felix Ingrand, Tatsuya Ichikawa, Ishikawa Ichiro, Lee Iverson, Iwamuro Motonori, Rajappa Iyer, Andreas Jaeger, Adam P. Jenkins, Randell Jesup, Fred Johansen, Gareth Jones, Greg Klanderman, Karl Kleinpaste, Michael Klingbeil, Peter Skov Knudsen, Shuhei Kobayashi, Petr Konecny, Koseki Yoshinori, Thor Kristoffersen, Jens Lautenbacher, Martin Larose, Seokchan Lee, Joerg Lenneis, Carsten Leonhardt, James LewisMoss, Christian Limpach, Markus Linnala, Dave Love, Mike McEwan, Tonny Madsen, Shlomo Mahlab, Nat Makarevitch, Istvan Marko, David Martin, Jason R. Mastaler, Gordon Matzigkeit, Timo Metzemakers, Richard Mlynarik, Lantz Moore, Morioka Tomohiko, Erik Toubro Nielsen, Hrvoje Niksic, Andy Norman, Fred Oberhauser, C. R. Oldham, Alexandre Oliva, Ken Olstad, Masaharu Onishi, Hideki Ono, Ettore Perazzoli, William Perry, Stephen Peters, Jens-Ulrik Holger Petersen, Ulrich Pfeifer, Matt Pharr, Andy Piper, John McClary Prevost, Bill Pringlemeir, Mike Pullen, Jim Radford, Colin Rafferty, Lasse Rasinen, Lars Balker Rasmussen, Joe Reiss, Renaud Rioboo, Roland B. Roberts, Bart Robinson, Christian von Roques, Markus Rost, Jason Rumney, Wolfgang Rupprecht, Jay Sachs, Dewey M. Sasser, Conrad Sauerwald, Loren Schall, Dan Schmidt, Ralph Schleicher, Philippe Schnoebelen, Andreas Schwab, Randal L. Schwartz, Danny Siu, Matt Simmons, Paul D. Smith, Jeff Sparkes, Toby Speight, Michael Sperber, Darren Stalder, Richard Stallman, Greg Stark, Sam Steingold, Paul Stevenson, Jonas Steverud, Paul Stodghill, Kiyokazu Suto, Kurt Swanson, Samuel Tardieu, Teddy, Chuck Thompson, Tozawa Akihiko, Philippe Troin, James Troup, Trung Tran-Duc, Jack Twilley, Aaron M. Ucko, Aki Vehtari, Didier Verna, Vladimir Volovich, Jan Vroonhof, Stefan Waldherr, Pete Ware, Barry A. Warsaw, Christoph Wedler, Joe Wells, Lee Willis, and Lloyd Zusman.

For a full overview of what each person has done, the ChangeLogs included in the Gnus alpha distributions should give ample reading (550kB and counting).

Apologies to everybody that I’ve forgotten, of which there are many, I’m sure.

Gee, that’s quite a list of people. I guess that must mean that there actually are people who are using Gnus. Who’d’a thunk it!

11.2.8 New Features

These lists are, of course, just short overviews of the most important new features. No, really. There are tons more. Yes, we have feeping creaturism in full effect.

11.2.8.1 (ding) Gnus

New features in Gnus 5.0/5.1:

• The look of all buffers can be changed by setting format-like variables (see section Group Buffer Format and see section Summary Buffer Format).
• Local spool and several NNTP servers can be used at once (see section Select Methods).
• You can combine groups into virtual groups (see section Virtual Groups).
• You can read a number of different mail formats (see section Getting Mail). All the mail back ends implement a convenient mail expiry scheme (see section Expiring Mail).
• Gnus can use various strategies for gathering threads that have lost their roots (thereby gathering loose sub-threads into one thread) or it can go back and retrieve enough headers to build a complete thread (see section Customizing Threading).
• Killed groups can be displayed in the group buffer, and you can read them as well (see section Listing Groups).
• Gnus can do partial group updates—you do not have to retrieve the entire active file just to check for new articles in a few groups (see section The Active File).
• Gnus implements a sliding scale of subscribedness to groups (see section Group Levels).
• You can score articles according to any number of criteria (see section Scoring). You can even get Gnus to find out how to score articles for you (see section Adaptive Scoring).
• Gnus maintains a dribble buffer that is auto-saved the normal Emacs manner, so it should be difficult to lose much data on what you have read if your machine should go down (see section Auto Save).
• Gnus now has its own startup file (‘~/.gnus.el’) to avoid cluttering up the ‘.emacs’ file.
• You can set the process mark on both groups and articles and perform operations on all the marked items (see section Process/Prefix).
• You can list subsets of groups according to, well, anything (see section Listing Groups).
• You can browse foreign servers and subscribe to groups from those servers (see section Browse Foreign Server).
• Gnus can fetch articles, asynchronously, on a second connection to the server (see section Asynchronous Article Fetching).
• You can cache articles locally (see section Article Caching).
• The uudecode functions have been expanded and generalized (see section Decoding Articles).
• You can still post uuencoded articles, which was a little-known feature of GNUS’ past (see section Uuencoding and Posting).
• Fetching parents (and other articles) now actually works without glitches (see section Finding the Parent).
• Gnus can fetch FAQs and group descriptions (see section Group Information).
• Digests (and other files) can be used as the basis for groups (see section Document Groups).
• Articles can be highlighted and customized (see section Customizing Articles).
• URLs and other external references can be buttonized (see section Article Buttons).
• You can do lots of strange stuff with the Gnus window & frame configuration (see section Window Layout).

11.2.8.2 September Gnus

New features in Gnus 5.2/5.3:

• A new message composition mode is used. All old customization variables for mail-mode, rnews-reply-mode and gnus-msg are now obsolete.
• Gnus is now able to generate sparse threads—threads where missing articles are represented by empty nodes (see section Customizing Threading).

  (setq gnus-build-sparse-threads 'some)

• Outgoing articles are stored on a special archive server (see section Archived Messages).
• Partial thread regeneration now happens when articles are referred.
• Gnus can make use of GroupLens predictions.
• Picons (personal icons) can be displayed under XEmacs (see section Picons).
• A trn-like tree buffer can be displayed (see section Tree Display).

  (setq gnus-use-trees t)

• An nn-like pick-and-read minor mode is available for the summary buffers (see section Pick and Read).

  (add-hook 'gnus-summary-mode-hook 'gnus-pick-mode)

• In binary groups you can use a special binary minor mode (see section Binary Groups).
• Groups can be grouped in a folding topic hierarchy (see section Group Topics).

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

• Gnus can re-send and bounce mail (see section Summary Mail Commands).
• Groups can now have a score, and bubbling based on entry frequency is possible (see section Group Score).

  (add-hook 'gnus-summary-exit-hook 'gnus-summary-bubble-group)

• Groups can be process-marked, and commands can be performed on groups of groups (see section Marking Groups).
• Caching is possible in virtual groups.
• nndoc now understands all kinds of digests, mail boxes, rnews news batches, ClariNet briefs collections, and just about everything else (see section Document Groups).
• Gnus has a new back end (nnsoup) to create/read SOUP packets.
• The Gnus cache is much faster.
• Groups can be sorted according to many criteria (see section Sorting Groups).
• New group parameters have been introduced to set list-addresses and expiry times (see section Group Parameters).
• All formatting specs allow specifying faces to be used (see section Formatting Fonts).
• There are several more commands for setting/removing/acting on process marked articles on the M P submap (see section Setting Process Marks).
• The summary buffer can be limited to show parts of the available articles based on a wide range of criteria. These commands have been bound to keys on the / submap (see section Limiting).
• Articles can be made persistent with the * command (see section Persistent Articles).
• All functions for hiding article elements are now toggles.
• Article headers can be buttonized (see section Article Washing).
• All mail back ends support fetching articles by Message-ID.
• Duplicate mail can now be treated properly (see section Duplicates).
• All summary mode commands are available directly from the article buffer (see section Article Keymap).
• Frames can be part of gnus-buffer-configuration (see section Window Layout).
• Mail can be re-scanned by a daemonic process (see section Daemons).
• Groups can be made permanently visible (see section Listing Groups).

  (setq gnus-permanently-visible-groups "^nnml:")

• Many new hooks have been introduced to make customizing easier.
• Gnus respects the Mail-Copies-To header.
• Threads can be gathered by looking at the References header (see section Customizing Threading).

  (setq gnus-summary-thread-gathering-function 'gnus-gather-threads-by-references)

• Read articles can be stored in a special backlog buffer to avoid refetching (see section Article Backlog).

  (setq gnus-keep-backlog 50)

• A clean copy of the current article is always stored in a separate buffer to allow easier treatment.
• Gnus can suggest where to save articles (see section Saving Articles).
• Gnus doesn’t have to do as much prompting when saving (see section Saving Articles).

  (setq gnus-prompt-before-saving t)

• gnus-uu can view decoded files asynchronously while fetching articles (see section Other Decode Variables).

  (setq gnus-uu-grabbed-file-functions 'gnus-uu-grab-view)

• Filling in the article buffer now works properly on cited text (see section Article Washing).
• Hiding cited text adds buttons to toggle hiding, and how much cited text to hide is now customizable (see section Article Hiding).

  (setq gnus-cited-lines-visible 2)

• Boring headers can be hidden (see section Article Hiding).
• Default scoring values can now be set from the menu bar.
• Further syntax checking of outgoing articles have been added.

11.2.8.3 Red Gnus

New features in Gnus 5.4/5.5:

• ‘nntp.el’ has been totally rewritten in an asynchronous fashion.
• Article prefetching functionality has been moved up into Gnus (see section Asynchronous Article Fetching).
• Scoring can now be performed with logical operators like and, or, not, and parent redirection (see section Advanced Scoring).
• Article washing status can be displayed in the article mode line (see section Misc Article).
• ‘gnus.el’ has been split into many smaller files.
• Suppression of duplicate articles based on Message-ID can be done (see section Duplicate Suppression).

  (setq gnus-suppress-duplicates t)

• New variables for specifying what score and adapt files are to be considered home score and adapt files (see section Home Score File) have been added.
• nndoc was rewritten to be easily extensible (see section Document Server Internals).
• Groups can inherit group parameters from parent topics (see section Topic Parameters).
• Article editing has been revamped and is now actually usable.
• Signatures can be recognized in more intelligent fashions (see section Article Signature).
• Summary pick mode has been made to look more nn-like. Line numbers are displayed and the . command can be used to pick articles (Pick and Read).
• Commands for moving the ‘.newsrc.eld’ from one server to another have been added (see section Changing Servers).
• There’s a way now to specify that “uninteresting” fields be suppressed when generating lines in buffers (see section Advanced Formatting).
• Several commands in the group buffer can be undone with C-M-_ (see section Undo).
• Scoring can be done on words using the new score type w (see section Score File Format).
• Adaptive scoring can be done on a Subject word-by-word basis (see section Adaptive Scoring).

  (setq gnus-use-adaptive-scoring '(word))

• Scores can be decayed (see section Score Decays).

  (setq gnus-decay-scores t)

• Scoring can be performed using a regexp on the Date header. The Date is normalized to compact ISO 8601 format first (see section Score File Format).
• A new command has been added to remove all data on articles from the native server (see section Changing Servers).
• A new command for reading collections of documents (nndoc with nnvirtual on top) has been added—C-M-d (see section Really Various Summary Commands).
• Process mark sets can be pushed and popped (see section Setting Process Marks).
• A new mail-to-news back end makes it possible to post even when the NNTP server doesn’t allow posting (see section Mail-To-News Gateways).
• A new back end for reading searches from Web search engines (DejaNews, Alta Vista, InReference) has been added (see section Web Searches).
• Groups inside topics can now be sorted using the standard sorting functions, and each topic can be sorted independently (see section Topic Sorting).
• Subsets of the groups can be sorted independently (Sorting Groups).
• Cached articles can be pulled into the groups (see section Summary Generation Commands).
• Score files are now applied in a more reliable order (see section Score Variables).
• Reports on where mail messages end up can be generated (see section Splitting Mail).
• More hooks and functions have been added to remove junk from incoming mail before saving the mail (see section Washing Mail).
• Emphasized text can be properly fontisized:

11.2.8.4 Quassia Gnus

New features in Gnus 5.6:

• New functionality for using Gnus as an offline newsreader has been added. A plethora of new commands and modes have been added. See section Gnus Unplugged, for the full story.
• The nndraft back end has returned, but works differently than before. All Message buffers are now also articles in the nndraft group, which is created automatically.
• gnus-alter-header-function can now be used to alter header values.
• gnus-summary-goto-article now accept Message-IDs.
• A new Message command for deleting text in the body of a message outside the region: C-c C-v.
• You can now post to component group in nnvirtual groups with C-u C-c C-c.
• nntp-rlogin-program—new variable to ease customization.
• C-u C-c C-c in gnus-article-edit-mode will now inhibit re-highlighting of the article buffer.
• New element in gnus-boring-article-headers—long-to.
• M-i symbolic prefix command. See section Symbolic Prefixes, for details.
• L and I in the summary buffer now take the symbolic prefix a to add the score rule to the ‘all.SCORE’ file.
• gnus-simplify-subject-functions variable to allow greater control over simplification.
• A T—new command for fetching the current thread.
• / T—new command for including the current thread in the limit.
• M-RET is a new Message command for breaking cited text.
• ‘\\1’-expressions are now valid in nnmail-split-methods.
• The custom-face-lookup function has been removed. If you used this function in your initialization files, you must rewrite them to use face-spec-set instead.
• Canceling now uses the current select method. Symbolic prefix a forces normal posting method.
• New command to translate M******** sm*rtq**t*s into proper text—W d.
• For easier debugging of nntp, you can set nntp-record-commands to a non-nil value.
• nntp now uses ‘~/.authinfo’, a ‘.netrc’-like file, for controlling where and how to send AUTHINFO to NNTP servers.
• A command for editing group parameters from the summary buffer has been added.
• A history of where mails have been split is available.
• A new article date command has been added—article-date-iso8601.
• Subjects can be simplified when threading by setting gnus-score-thread-simplify.
• A new function for citing in Message has been added—message-cite-original-without-signature.
• article-strip-all-blank-lines—new article command.
• A new Message command to kill to the end of the article has been added.
• A minimum adaptive score can be specified by using the gnus-adaptive-word-minimum variable.
• The “lapsed date” article header can be kept continually updated by the gnus-start-date-timer command.
• Web listserv archives can be read with the nnlistserv back end.
• Old dejanews archives can now be read by nnweb.

11.2.8.5 Pterodactyl Gnus

New features in Gnus 5.8:

• The mail-fetching functions have changed. See the manual for the many details. In particular, all procmail fetching variables are gone.

  If you used procmail like in

  (setq nnmail-use-procmail t) (setq nnmail-spool-file 'procmail) (setq nnmail-procmail-directory "~/mail/incoming/") (setq nnmail-procmail-suffix "\\.in")

  this now has changed to

  (setq mail-sources '((directory :path "~/mail/incoming/" :suffix ".in")))

  See section Mail Source Specifiers.

• Gnus is now a MIME-capable reader. This affects many parts of Gnus, and adds a slew of new commands. See the manual for details.
• Gnus has also been multilingualized. This also affects too many parts of Gnus to summarize here, and adds many new variables.
• gnus-auto-select-first can now be a function to be called to position point.
• The user can now decide which extra headers should be included in summary buffers and NOV files.
• gnus-article-display-hook has been removed. Instead, a number of variables starting with gnus-treat- have been added.
• The Gnus posting styles have been redone again and now works in a subtly different manner.
• New web-based back ends have been added: nnslashdot, nnwarchive and nnultimate. nnweb has been revamped, again, to keep up with ever-changing layouts.
• Gnus can now read IMAP mail via nnimap.

11.2.8.6 Oort Gnus

New features in Gnus 5.10:

• Installation changes
  • Upgrading from previous (stable) version if you have used Oort.

    If you have tried Oort (the unstable Gnus branch leading to this release) but went back to a stable version, be careful when upgrading to this version. In particular, you will probably want to remove all ‘.marks’ (nnml) and ‘.mrk’ (nnfolder) files, so that flags are read from your ‘.newsrc.eld’ instead of from the ‘.marks’/‘.mrk’ file where this release store flags. See a later entry for more information about marks. Note that downgrading isn’t save in general.

  • Lisp files are now installed in ‘.../site-lisp/gnus/’ by default. It defaulted to ‘.../site-lisp/’ formerly. In addition to this, the new installer issues a warning if other Gnus installations which will shadow the latest one are detected. You can then remove those shadows manually or remove them using make remove-installed-shadows.
  • New ‘make.bat’ for compiling and installing Gnus under MS Windows

    Use ‘make.bat’ if you want to install Gnus under MS Windows, the first argument to the batch-program should be the directory where ‘xemacs.exe’ respectively ‘emacs.exe’ is located, if you want to install Gnus after compiling it, give ‘make.bat’ /copy as the second parameter.

    ‘make.bat’ has been rewritten from scratch, it now features automatic recognition of XEmacs and Emacs, generates ‘gnus-load.el’, checks if errors occur while compilation and generation of info files and reports them at the end of the build process. It now uses makeinfo if it is available and falls back to ‘infohack.el’ otherwise. ‘make.bat’ should now install all files which are necessary to run Gnus and be generally a complete replacement for the configure; make; make install cycle used under Unix systems.

    The new ‘make.bat’ makes ‘make-x.bat’ and ‘xemacs.mak’ superfluous, so they have been removed.

  • ‘~/News/overview/’ not used.

    As a result of the following change, the ‘~/News/overview/’ directory is not used any more. You can safely delete the entire hierarchy.

  • (require 'gnus-load)

    If you use a stand-alone Gnus distribution, you’d better add (require 'gnus-load) into your ‘~/.emacs’ after adding the Gnus lisp directory into load-path.

    File ‘gnus-load.el’ contains autoload commands, functions and variables, some of which may not be included in distributions of Emacsen.

• New packages and libraries within Gnus
  • The revised Gnus FAQ is included in the manual, See section Frequently Asked Questions.
  • TLS wrapper shipped with Gnus

    TLS/SSL is now supported in IMAP and NNTP via ‘tls.el’ and GnuTLS.

  • Improved anti-spam features.

    Gnus is now able to take out spam from your mail and news streams using a wide variety of programs and filter rules. Among the supported methods are RBL blocklists, bogofilter and white/blacklists. Hooks for easy use of external packages such as SpamAssassin and Hashcash are also new. Thwarting Email Spam and Spam Package.

  • Gnus supports server-side mail filtering using Sieve.

    Sieve rules can be added as Group Parameters for groups, and the complete Sieve script is generated using D g from the Group buffer, and then uploaded to the server using C-c C-l in the generated Sieve buffer. See section Sieve Commands, and the new Sieve manual (sieve)Top section ‘Top’ in Emacs Sieve.

• Changes in group mode
  • gnus-group-read-ephemeral-group can be called interactively, using G M.
  • Retrieval of charters and control messages

    There are new commands for fetching newsgroup charters (H c) and control messages (H C).

  • The new variable gnus-parameters can be used to set group parameters.

    Earlier this was done only via G p (or G c), which stored the parameters in ‘~/.newsrc.eld’, but via this variable you can enjoy the powers of customize, and simplified backups since you set the variable in ‘~/.gnus.el’ instead of ‘~/.newsrc.eld’. The variable maps regular expressions matching group names to group parameters, a’la:

    (setq gnus-parameters '(("mail\\..*" (gnus-show-threads nil) (gnus-use-scoring nil)) ("^nnimap:\\(foo.bar\\)$" (to-group . "\\1"))))

  • Unread count correct in nnimap groups.

    The estimated number of unread articles in the group buffer should now be correct for nnimap groups. This is achieved by calling nnimap-fixup-unread-after-getting-new-news from the gnus-setup-news-hook (called on startup) and gnus-after-getting-new-news-hook (called after getting new mail). If you have modified those variables from the default, you may want to add nnimap-fixup-unread-after-getting-new-news again. If you were happy with the estimate and want to save some (minimal) time when getting new mail, remove the function.

  • Group names are treated as UTF-8 by default.

    This is supposedly what USEFOR wanted to migrate to. See gnus-group-name-charset-group-alist and gnus-group-name-charset-method-alist for customization.

  • gnus-group-charset-alist and gnus-group-ignored-charsets-alist.

    The regexps in these variables are compared with full group names instead of real group names in 5.8. Users who customize these variables should change those regexps accordingly. For example:

    ("^han\\>" euc-kr) -> ("\\(^\\|:\\)han\\>" euc-kr)

  • Old intermediate incoming mail files (‘Incoming*’) are deleted after a couple of days, not immediately. See section Mail Source Customization. (New in Gnus 5.10.10 / Emacs 22.2)
• Changes in summary and article mode
  • F (gnus-article-followup-with-original) and R (gnus-article-reply-with-original) only yank the text in the region if the region is active.
  • In draft groups, e is now bound to gnus-draft-edit-message. Use B w for gnus-summary-edit-article instead.
  • Article Buttons

    More buttons for URLs, mail addresses, Message-IDs, Info links, man pages and Emacs or Gnus related references. See section Article Buttons. The variables gnus-button-*-level can be used to control the appearance of all article buttons. See section Article button levels.

  • Single-part yenc encoded attachments can be decoded.
  • Picons

    The picons code has been reimplemented to work in GNU Emacs—some of the previous options have been removed or renamed.

    Picons are small “personal icons” representing users, domain and newsgroups, which can be displayed in the Article buffer. See section Picons.

  • If the new option gnus-treat-body-boundary is non-nil, a boundary line is drawn at the end of the headers.
  • Signed article headers (X-PGP-Sig) can be verified with W p.
  • The Summary Buffer uses an arrow in the fringe to indicate the current article. Use (setq gnus-summary-display-arrow nil) to disable it.
  • Warn about email replies to news

    Do you often find yourself replying to news by email by mistake? Then the new option gnus-confirm-mail-reply-to-news is just the thing for you.

  • If the new option gnus-summary-display-while-building is non-nil, the summary buffer is shown and updated as it’s being built.
  • Gnus supports RFC 2369 mailing list headers, and adds a number of related commands in mailing list groups. See section Mailing List.
  • The Date header can be displayed in a format that can be read aloud in English. See section Article Date.
  • diffs are automatically highlighted in groups matching mm-uu-diff-groups-regexp
  • Better handling of Microsoft citation styles

    Gnus now tries to recognize the mangled header block that some Microsoft mailers use to indicate that the rest of the message is a citation, even though it is not quoted in any way. The variable gnus-cite-unsightly-citation-regexp matches the start of these citations.

    The new command W Y f (gnus-article-outlook-deuglify-article) allows deuglifying broken Outlook (Express) articles.

  • gnus-article-skip-boring

    If you set gnus-article-skip-boring to t, then Gnus will not scroll down to show you a page that contains only boring text, which by default means cited text and signature. You can customize what is skippable using gnus-article-boring-faces.

    This feature is especially useful if you read many articles that consist of a little new content at the top with a long, untrimmed message cited below.

  • Smileys (‘:-)’, ‘;-)’ etc.) are now displayed graphically in Emacs too.

    Put (setq gnus-treat-display-smileys nil) in ‘~/.gnus.el’ to disable it.

  • Face headers handling. See section Face.
  • In the summary buffer, the new command / N inserts new messages and / o inserts old messages.
  • Gnus decodes morse encoded messages if you press W m.
  • gnus-summary-line-format

    The default value changed to ‘%U%R%z%I%(%[%4L: %-23,23f%]%) %s\n’. Moreover gnus-extra-headers, nnmail-extra-headers and gnus-ignored-from-addresses changed their default so that the users name will be replaced by the recipient’s name or the group name posting to for NNTP groups.

  • Deleting of attachments.

    The command gnus-mime-save-part-and-strip (bound to C-o on MIME buttons) saves a part and replaces the part with an external one. gnus-mime-delete-part (bound to d on MIME buttons) removes a part. It works only on back ends that support editing.

  • gnus-default-charset

    The default value is determined from the current-language-environment variable, instead of iso-8859-1. Also the ‘.*’ item in gnus-group-charset-alist is removed.

  • Printing capabilities are enhanced.

    Gnus supports Muttprint natively with O P from the Summary and Article buffers. Also, each individual MIME part can be printed using p on the MIME button.

  • Extended format specs.

    Format spec ‘%&user-date;’ is added into gnus-summary-line-format-alist. Also, user defined extended format specs are supported. The extended format specs look like ‘%u&foo;’, which invokes function gnus-user-format-function-foo. Because ‘&’ is used as the escape character, old user defined format ‘%u&’ is no longer supported.

  • / * (gnus-summary-limit-include-cached) is rewritten.

    It was aliased to Y c (gnus-summary-insert-cached-articles). The new function filters out other articles.

  • Some limiting commands accept a C-u prefix to negate the match.

    If C-u is used on subject, author or extra headers, i.e., / s, / a, and / x (gnus-summary-limit-to-{subject,author,extra}) respectively, the result will be to display all articles that do not match the expression.

  • Gnus inlines external parts (message/external).
• Changes in Message mode and related Gnus features
  • Delayed articles

    You can delay the sending of a message with C-c C-j in the Message buffer. The messages are delivered at specified time. This is useful for sending yourself reminders. See section Delayed Articles.

  • If the new option nnml-use-compressed-files is non-nil, the nnml back end allows compressed message files.
  • The new option gnus-gcc-mark-as-read automatically marks Gcc articles as read.
  • Externalizing of attachments

    If gnus-gcc-externalize-attachments or message-fcc-externalize-attachments is non-nil, attach local files as external parts.

  • The envelope sender address can be customized when using Sendmail. See Mail Variables: (message)Mail Variables section ‘Mail Variables’ in Message Manual.
  • Gnus no longer generate the Sender: header automatically.

    Earlier it was generated when the user configurable email address was different from the Gnus guessed default user address. As the guessing algorithm is rarely correct these days, and (more controversially) the only use of the Sender: header was to check if you are entitled to cancel/supersede news (which is now solved by Cancel Locks instead, see another entry), generation of the header has been disabled by default. See the variables message-required-headers, message-required-news-headers, and message-required-mail-headers.

  • Features from third party ‘message-utils.el’ added to ‘message.el’.

    Message now asks if you wish to remove ‘(was: <old subject>)’ from subject lines (see message-subject-trailing-was-query). C-c M-m and C-c M-f inserts markers indicating included text. C-c C-f a adds a X-No-Archive: header. C-c C-f x inserts appropriate headers and a note in the body for cross-postings and followups (see the variables message-cross-post-*).

  • References and X-Draft-From headers are no longer generated when you start composing messages and message-generate-headers-first is nil.
  • Easy inclusion of X-Faces headers. See section X-Face.
  • Group Carbon Copy (GCC) quoting

    To support groups that contains SPC and other weird characters, groups are quoted before they are placed in the Gcc: header. This means variables such as gnus-message-archive-group should no longer contain quote characters to make groups containing SPC work. Also, if you are using the string ‘nnml:foo, nnml:bar’ (indicating Gcc into two groups) you must change it to return the list ("nnml:foo" "nnml:bar"), otherwise the Gcc: line will be quoted incorrectly. Note that returning the string ‘nnml:foo, nnml:bar’ was incorrect earlier, it just didn’t generate any problems since it was inserted directly.

  • message-insinuate-rmail

    Adding (message-insinuate-rmail) and (setq mail-user-agent 'gnus-user-agent) in ‘.emacs’ convinces Rmail to compose, reply and forward messages in message-mode, where you can enjoy the power of MML.

  • message-minibuffer-local-map

    The line below enables BBDB in resending a message:

    (define-key message-minibuffer-local-map [(tab)] 'bbdb-complete-name)

  • gnus-posting-styles

    Add a new format of match like

    ((header "to" "larsi.*org") (Organization "Somewhere, Inc."))

    The old format like the lines below is obsolete, but still accepted.

    (header "to" "larsi.*org" (Organization "Somewhere, Inc."))

  • message-ignored-news-headers and message-ignored-mail-headers

    ‘X-Draft-From’ and ‘X-Gnus-Agent-Meta-Information’ have been added into these two variables. If you customized those, perhaps you need add those two headers too.

  • Gnus supports the “format=flowed” (RFC 2646) parameter. On composing messages, it is enabled by use-hard-newlines. Decoding format=flowed was present but not documented in earlier versions.
  • The option mm-fill-flowed can be used to disable treatment of “format=flowed” messages. Also, flowed text is disabled when sending inline PGP signed messages. See (emacs-mime)Flowed text section ‘Flowed text’ in The Emacs MIME Manual. (New in Gnus 5.10.7)
  • Gnus supports the generation of RFC 2298 Disposition Notification requests.

    This is invoked with the C-c M-n key binding from message mode.

  • Message supports the Importance: (RFC 2156) header.

    In the message buffer, C-c C-f C-i or C-c C-u cycles through the valid values.

  • Gnus supports Cancel Locks in News.

    This means a header ‘Cancel-Lock’ is inserted in news posting. It is used to determine if you wrote an article or not (for canceling and superseding). Gnus generates a random password string the first time you post a message, and saves it in your ‘~/.emacs’ using the Custom system. While the variable is called canlock-password, it is not security sensitive data. Publishing your canlock string on the web will not allow anyone to be able to anything she could not already do. The behavior can be changed by customizing message-insert-canlock.

  • Gnus supports PGP (RFC 1991/2440), PGP/MIME (RFC 2015/3156) and S/MIME (RFC 2630–2633).

    It needs an external S/MIME and OpenPGP implementation, but no additional Lisp libraries. This add several menu items to the Attachments menu, and C-c RET key bindings, when composing messages. This also obsoletes gnus-article-hide-pgp-hook.

  • MML (Mime compose) prefix changed from M-m to C-c C-m.

    This change was made to avoid conflict with the standard binding of back-to-indentation, which is also useful in message mode.

  • The default for message-forward-show-mml changed to the symbol best.

    The behavior for the best value is to show MML (i.e., convert to MIME) when appropriate. MML will not be used when forwarding signed or encrypted messages, as the conversion invalidate the digital signature.

  • If auto-compression-mode is enabled, attachments are automatically decompressed when activated.
  • Support for non-ASCII domain names

    Message supports non-ASCII domain names in From:, To: and Cc: and will query you whether to perform encoding when you try to send a message. The variable message-use-idna controls this. Gnus will also decode non-ASCII domain names in From:, To: and Cc: when you view a message. The variable gnus-use-idna controls this.

  • You can now drag and drop attachments to the Message buffer. See mml-dnd-protocol-alist and mml-dnd-attach-options. See (message)MIME section ‘MIME’ in Message Manual.
  • auto-fill-mode is enabled by default in Message mode. See message-fill-column. See (message)Various Message Variables section ‘Message Headers’ in Message Manual.
• Changes in back ends
  • Gnus can display RSS newsfeeds as a newsgroup. See section RSS.
  • The nndoc back end now supports mailman digests and exim bounces.
  • Gnus supports Maildir groups.

    Gnus includes a new back end ‘nnmaildir.el’. See section Maildir.

  • The nnml and nnfolder back ends store marks for each groups.

    This makes it possible to take backup of nnml/nnfolder servers/groups separately of ‘~/.newsrc.eld’, while preserving marks. It also makes it possible to share articles and marks between users (without sharing the ‘~/.newsrc.eld’ file) within, e.g., a department. It works by storing the marks stored in ‘~/.newsrc.eld’ in a per-group file ‘.marks’ (for nnml) and ‘groupname.mrk’ (for nnfolder, named groupname). If the nnml/nnfolder is moved to another machine, Gnus will automatically use the ‘.marks’ or ‘.mrk’ file instead of the information in ‘~/.newsrc.eld’. The new server variables nnml-marks-is-evil and nnfolder-marks-is-evil can be used to disable this feature.

• Appearance
  • The menu bar item (in Group and Summary buffer) named “Misc” has been renamed to “Gnus”.
  • The menu bar item (in Message mode) named “MML” has been renamed to “Attachments”. Note that this menu also contains security related stuff, like signing and encryption (see Security: (message)Security section ‘Security’ in Message Manual).
  • The tool bars have been updated to use GNOME icons in Group, Summary and Message mode. You can also customize the tool bars: M-x customize-apropos RET -tool-bar$ should get you started. This is a new feature in Gnus 5.10.10. (Only for Emacs, not in XEmacs.)
  • The tool bar icons are now (de)activated correctly in the group buffer, see the variable gnus-group-update-tool-bar. Its default value depends on your Emacs version. This is a new feature in Gnus 5.10.9.
• Miscellaneous changes
  • gnus-agent

    The Gnus Agent has seen a major updated and is now enabled by default, and all nntp and nnimap servers from gnus-select-method and gnus-secondary-select-method are agentized by default. Earlier only the server in gnus-select-method was agentized by the default, and the agent was disabled by default. When the agent is enabled, headers are now also retrieved from the Agent cache instead of the back ends when possible. Earlier this only happened in the unplugged state. You can enroll or remove servers with J a and J r in the server buffer. Gnus will not download articles into the Agent cache, unless you instruct it to do so, though, by using J u or J s from the Group buffer. You revert to the old behavior of having the Agent disabled with (setq gnus-agent nil). Note that putting (gnus-agentize) in ‘~/.gnus.el’ is not needed any more.

  • Gnus reads the NOV and articles in the Agent if plugged.

    If one reads an article while plugged, and the article already exists in the Agent, it won’t get downloaded once more. (setq gnus-agent-cache nil) reverts to the old behavior.

  • Dired integration

    gnus-dired-minor-mode (see Interaction with other modes) installs key bindings in dired buffers to send a file as an attachment, open a file using the appropriate mailcap entry, and print a file using the mailcap entry.

  • The format spec %C for positioning point has changed to %*.
  • gnus-slave-unplugged

    A new command which starts Gnus offline in slave mode.

11.2.8.7 No Gnus

New features in No Gnus:

• Installation changes
  • Upgrading from previous (stable) version if you have used No Gnus.

    If you have tried No Gnus (the unstable Gnus branch leading to this release) but went back to a stable version, be careful when upgrading to this version. In particular, you will probably want to remove the ‘~/News/marks’ directory (perhaps selectively), so that flags are read from your ‘~/.newsrc.eld’ instead of from the stale marks file, where this release will store flags for nntp. See a later entry for more information about nntp marks. Note that downgrading isn’t safe in general.

  • Incompatibility when switching from Emacs 23 to Emacs 22 In Emacs 23, Gnus uses Emacs’ new internal coding system utf-8-emacs for saving articles drafts and ‘~/.newsrc.eld’. These files may not be read correctly in Emacs 22 and below. If you want to use Gnus across different Emacs versions, you may set mm-auto-save-coding-system to emacs-mule.
  • Lisp files are now installed in ‘.../site-lisp/gnus/’ by default. It defaulted to ‘.../site-lisp/’ formerly. In addition to this, the new installer issues a warning if other Gnus installations which will shadow the latest one are detected. You can then remove those shadows manually or remove them using make remove-installed-shadows.
  • The installation directory name is allowed to have spaces and/or tabs.
• New packages and libraries within Gnus
  • Gnus includes the Emacs Lisp SASL library.

    This provides a clean API to SASL mechanisms from within Emacs. The user visible aspects of this, compared to the earlier situation, include support for DIGEST-MD5 and NTLM. See (sasl)Top section ‘Emacs SASL’ in Emacs SASL.

  • ManageSieve connections uses the SASL library by default.

    The primary change this brings is support for DIGEST-MD5 and NTLM, when the server supports it.

  • Gnus includes a password cache mechanism in password.el.

    It is enabled by default (see password-cache), with a short timeout of 16 seconds (see password-cache-expiry). If PGG is used as the PGP back end, the PGP passphrase is managed by this mechanism. Passwords for ManageSieve connections are managed by this mechanism, after querying the user about whether to do so.

  • Using EasyPG with Gnus When EasyPG, is available, Gnus will use it instead of PGG. EasyPG is an Emacs user interface to GNU Privacy Guard. See (epa)Top section ‘EasyPG Assistant user’s manual’ in EasyPG Assistant user’s manual. EasyPG is included in Emacs 23 and available separately as well.
• Changes in group mode
  • Old intermediate incoming mail files (‘Incoming*’) are deleted after a couple of days, not immediately. See section Mail Source Customization.
• Changes in summary and article mode
  • Gnus now supports sticky article buffers. Those are article buffers that are not reused when you select another article. See section Sticky Articles.
  • Gnus can selectively display ‘text/html’ articles with a WWW browser with K H. See section MIME Commands.
  • International host names (IDNA) can now be decoded inside article bodies using W i (gnus-summary-idna-message). This requires that GNU Libidn (http://www.gnu.org/software/libidn/) has been installed.
  • The non-ASCII group names handling has been much improved. The back ends that fully support non-ASCII group names are now nntp, nnml, and nnrss. Also the agent, the cache, and the marks features work with those back ends. See section Accessing groups of non-English names.
  • Gnus now displays DNS master files sent as text/dns using dns-mode.
  • Gnus supports new limiting commands in the Summary buffer: / r (gnus-summary-limit-to-replied) and / R (gnus-summary-limit-to-recipient). See section Limiting.
  • You can now fetch all ticked articles from the server using Y t (gnus-summary-insert-ticked-articles). See section Summary Generation Commands.
  • Gnus supports a new sort command in the Summary buffer: C-c C-s C-t (gnus-summary-sort-by-recipient). See section Summary Sorting.
  • S/MIME now features LDAP user certificate searches. You need to configure the server in smime-ldap-host-list.
  • URLs inside OpenPGP headers are retrieved and imported to your PGP key ring when you click on them.
  • Picons can be displayed right from the textual address, see gnus-picon-style. See section Picons.
  • ANSI SGR control sequences can be transformed using W A.

    ANSI sequences are used in some Chinese hierarchies for highlighting articles (gnus-article-treat-ansi-sequences).

  • Gnus now MIME decodes articles even when they lack "MIME-Version" header. This changes the default of gnus-article-loose-mime.
  • gnus-decay-scores can be a regexp matching score files. For example, set it to ‘\\.ADAPT\\'’ and only adaptive score files will be decayed. See section Score Decays.
  • Strings prefixing to the To and Newsgroup headers in summary lines when using gnus-ignored-from-addresses can be customized with gnus-summary-to-prefix and gnus-summary-newsgroup-prefix. See section To From Newsgroups.
  • You can replace MIME parts with external bodies. See gnus-mime-replace-part and gnus-article-replace-part. See section MIME Commands, Using MIME.
  • The option mm-fill-flowed can be used to disable treatment of format=flowed messages. Also, flowed text is disabled when sending inline PGP signed messages. See (emacs-mime)Flowed text section ‘Flowed text’ in The Emacs MIME Manual. (New in Gnus 5.10.7)
  • Now the new command S W (gnus-article-wide-reply-with-original) for a wide reply in the article buffer yanks a text that is in the active region, if it is set, as well as the R (gnus-article-reply-with-original) command. Note that the R command in the article buffer no longer accepts a prefix argument, which was used to make it do a wide reply. See section Article Keymap.
  • The new command C-h b (gnus-article-describe-bindings) used in the article buffer now shows not only the article commands but also the real summary commands that are accessible from the article buffer.
• Changes in Message mode
  • Gnus now supports the “hashcash” client puzzle anti-spam mechanism. Use (setq message-generate-hashcash t) to enable. See section Hashcash.
  • You can now drag and drop attachments to the Message buffer. See mml-dnd-protocol-alist and mml-dnd-attach-options. See (message)MIME section ‘MIME’ in Message Manual.
  • The option message-yank-empty-prefix now controls how empty lines are prefixed in cited text. See (message)Insertion Variables section ‘Insertion Variables’ in Message Manual.
  • Gnus uses narrowing to hide headers in Message buffers. The References header is hidden by default. To make all headers visible, use (setq message-hidden-headers nil). See (message)Message Headers section ‘Message Headers’ in Message Manual.
  • You can highlight different levels of citations like in the article buffer. See gnus-message-highlight-citation.
  • auto-fill-mode is enabled by default in Message mode. See message-fill-column. See (message)Various Message Variables section ‘Message Headers’ in Message Manual.
  • You can now store signature files in a special directory named message-signature-directory.
  • The option message-citation-line-format controls the format of the "Whomever writes:" line. You need to set message-citation-line-function to message-insert-formatted-citation-line as well.
• Changes in back ends
  • The nntp back end stores article marks in ‘~/News/marks’.

    The directory can be changed using the (customizable) variable nntp-marks-directory, and marks can be disabled using the (back end) variable nntp-marks-is-evil. The advantage of this is that you can copy ‘~/News/marks’ (using rsync, scp or whatever) to another Gnus installation, and it will realize what articles you have read and marked. The data in ‘~/News/marks’ has priority over the same data in ‘~/.newsrc.eld’.

  • You can import and export your RSS subscriptions from OPML files. See section RSS.
  • IMAP identity (RFC 2971) is supported.

    By default, Gnus does not send any information about itself, but you can customize it using the variable nnimap-id.

  • The nnrss back end now supports multilingual text. Non-ASCII group names for the nnrss groups are also supported. See section RSS.
  • Retrieving mail with POP3 is supported over SSL/TLS and with StartTLS.
  • The nnml back end allows other compression programs beside ‘gzip’ for compressed message files. See section Mail Spool.
  • The nnml back end supports group compaction.

    This feature, accessible via the functions gnus-group-compact-group (G z in the group buffer) and gnus-server-compact-server (z in the server buffer) renumbers all articles in a group, starting from 1 and removing gaps. As a consequence, you get a correct total article count (until messages are deleted again).

• Appearance
  • The tool bar has been updated to use GNOME icons. You can also customize the tool bars: M-x customize-apropos RET -tool-bar$ should get you started. (Only for Emacs, not in XEmacs.)
  • The tool bar icons are now (de)activated correctly in the group buffer, see the variable gnus-group-update-tool-bar. Its default value depends on your Emacs version.
  • You can change the location of XEmacs’ toolbars in Gnus buffers. See gnus-use-toolbar and message-use-toolbar.
• Miscellaneous changes
  • Having edited the select-method for the foreign server in the server buffer is immediately reflected to the subscription of the groups which use the server in question. For instance, if you change nntp-via-address into ‘bar.example.com’ from ‘foo.example.com’, Gnus will connect to the news host by way of the intermediate host ‘bar.example.com’ from next time.
  • The ‘all.SCORE’ file can be edited from the group buffer using W e.

11.2.8.8 Ma Gnus

I’m sure there will be lots of text here. It’s really spelled 真 Gnus.

New features in Ma Gnus:

• Installation changes
  • Lisp source files and info files to be installed will be compressed by gzip by default.

    If you don’t want those files to be compressed, use the configure option ‘--without-compress-install’. Lisp source files that don’t have the compiled elc version in the installation directory will not be compressed.

• Changes in summary and article mode
  • By default, MIME part buttons for attachments (if any) will appear in the end of the article header in addition to the bottom of the article body, so you can easily find them without scrolling the article again and again. See section MIME Commands.
• Changes in Message mode and related Gnus features
  • The new hooks gnus-gcc-pre-body-encode-hook and gnus-gcc-post-body-encode-hook are run before/after encoding the message body of the Gcc copy of a sent message. See See section Archived Messages.

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