The latest released version of Gnus isn't included in Emacs 21, therefor you should get the Gnus tarball from http://www.gnus.org/dist/gnus.tar.gz or via anonymous FTP from ftp://ftp.gnus.org/pub/gnus/gnus.tar.gz. If you use XEmacs instead of Emacs you can use XEmacs' package system instead.

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.

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).

Oort Gnus was the name of the development version of Gnus, which became Gnus 5.10 in autumn 2003. No Gnus is the name of the current development version which will once become Gnus 5.12 or Gnus 6. (If you're wondering why not 5.11, the odd version numbers are normally used for the Gnus versions bundled with Emacs)

Jingle please: Gnus 5.10 is released, get it while it's hot! As well as the step in version number is rather small, Gnus 5.10 has tons of new features which you shouldn't miss. The current release (5.10.8) should be at least as stable as the latest release of the 5.8 series.

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

The easiest way is to tell your old mail program to export the messages in mbox format. Most Unix mailers are able to do this, if you come from the MS Windows world, you may find tools at http://mbx2mbox.sourceforge.net/. Now you've got to import this mbox file into Gnus. To do this, create a nndoc group based on the mbox file by saying 'G f /path/file.mbox RET' in Group buffer. You now have read-only access to your mail.

If you need to connect and post to an authenticated news server, you'll need to give Gnus a password to send along to the server. To have Gnus prompt for a password, add the following to your startup file: (add-hook 'nntp-server-opened-hook 'nntp-send-authinfo)

You get the message described in the q/a pair above while starting Gnus, right? It's an other symptom for the same problem, so read the answer above.

Of course. You can specify more sources for articles in the variable gnus-secondary-select-methods. Add something like this in ~/.gnus.el: add-to-list 'gnus-secondary-select-methods '(nntp "news.yourSecondProvider.net")) (add-to-list 'gnus-secondary-select-methods '(nntp "news.yourThirdProvider.net"))

The reason for this could be the way Gnus reads it's active file, see the node "The Active File" in the Gnus manual for things you might try to speed the process up. An other idea would be to byte compile your ~/.gnus.el (say 'M-x byte-compile-file RET ~/.gnus.el RET' to do it). Finally, if you have require statements in your .gnus, you could replace them with eval-after-load, which loads the stuff not at startup time, but when it's needed. Say you've got this in your ~/.gnus.el:

Unfortunately not anymore. My config files were all online but the links broke when I reorganised the site. Fixing the links is somewhere low down on my todo list.

If your system administrator has set things up properly, starting Gnus and reading news is extremely easy—you just type M-x gnus in your Emacs. If not, you should customize the variable gnus-select-method as described in Finding the News. For a minimal setup for posting should also customize the variables user-full-name and user-mail-address. If you want to start Gnus in a different frame, you can use the command M-x gnus-other-frame instead.

You've got to tell Gnus where to fetch the news from. Read the documentation for information on how to do this. As a first start, put those lines in ~/.gnus.el: setq gnus-select-method '(nntp "news.yourprovider.net")) (setq user-mail-address "you@yourprovider.net") (setq user-full-name "Your Name") The ~/ means the home directory where Gnus and Emacs look for the configuration files.

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

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

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

The variable gnus-visible-headers controls which headers are shown, its value is a regular expression, header lines which match it are shown. So if you want author, subject, date, and if the header exists, Followup-To and MUA / NUA say this in ~/.gnus.el: setq gnus-visible-headers '("^From" "^Subject" "^Date" "^Newsgroups" "^Followup-To" "^User-Agent" "^X-Newsreader" "^X-Mailer"))