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Composing Messages

All commands for posting and mailing will put you in a message buffer where you can edit the article all you like, before you send the article by pressing C-c C-c. See section `Top' in The Message Manual. If you are in a foreign news group, and you wish to post the article using the foreign server, you can give a prefix to C-c C-c to make Gnus try to post using the foreign server.

Also see see section Canceling Articles for information on how to remove articles you shouldn't have posted.

Mail

Variables for customizing outgoing mail:

gnus-uu-digest-headers
List of regexps to match headers included in digested messages. The headers will be included in the sequence they are matched.
gnus-add-to-list
If non-nil, add a to-list group parameter to mail groups that have none when you do a a.

Post

Variables for composing news articles:

gnus-sent-message-ids-file
Gnus will keep a Message-ID history file of all the mails it has sent. If it discovers that it has already sent a mail, it will ask the user whether to re-send the mail. (This is primarily useful when dealing with SOUP packets and the like where one is apt to sent the same packet multiple times.) This variable says what the name of this history file is. It is `~/News/Sent-Message-IDs' by default. Set this variable to nil if you don't want Gnus to keep a history file.
gnus-sent-message-ids-length
This variable says how many Message-IDs to keep in the history file. It is 1000 by default.

Posting Server

When you press those magical C-c C-c keys to ship off your latest (extremely intelligent, of course) article, where does it go?

Thank you for asking. I hate you.

It can be quite complicated. Normally, Gnus will use the same native server. However. If your native server doesn't allow posting, just reading, you probably want to use some other server to post your (extremely intelligent and fabulously interesting) articles. You can then set the gnus-post-method to some other method:

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

Now, if you've done this, and then this server rejects your article, or this server is down, what do you do then? To override this variable you can use a non-zero prefix to the C-c C-c command to force using the "current" server for posting.

If you give a zero prefix (i.e., C-u 0 C-c C-c) to that command, Gnus will prompt you for what method to use for posting.

You can also set gnus-post-method to a list of select methods. If that's the case, Gnus will always prompt you for what method to use for posting.

Mail and Post

Here's a list of variables that are relevant to both mailing and posting:

gnus-mailing-list-groups
If your news server offers groups that are really mailing lists that are gatewayed to the NNTP server, you can read those groups without problems, but you can't post/followup to them without some difficulty. One solution is to add a to-address to the group parameters (see section Group Parameters). An easier thing to do is set the gnus-mailing-list-groups to a regexp that match the groups that really are mailing lists. Then, at least, followups to the mailing lists will work most of the time. Posting to these groups (a) is still a pain, though.

You may want to do spell-checking on messages that you send out. Or, if you don't want to spell-check by hand, you could add automatic spell-checking via the ispell package:

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

Archived Messages

Gnus provides a few different methods for storing the mail and news you send. The default method is to use the archive virtual server to store the messages. If you want to disable this completely, the gnus-message-archive-group variable should be nil, which is the default.

gnus-message-archive-method says what virtual server Gnus is to use to store sent messages. The default is:

(nnfolder "archive"
          (nnfolder-directory "~/Mail/archive/"))

You can, however, use any mail select method (nnml, nnmbox, etc.). nnfolder is a quite likeable select method for doing this sort of thing, though. If you don't like the default directory chosen, you could say something like:

(setq gnus-message-archive-method
      '(nnfolder "archive" 
                 (nnfolder-inhibit-expiry t)
                 (nnfolder-active-file "~/News/sent-mail/active")
                 (nnfolder-directory "~/News/sent-mail/")))

Gnus will insert Gcc headers in all outgoing messages that point to one or more group(s) on that server. Which group to use is determined by the gnus-message-archive-group variable.

This variable can be:

Let's illustrate:

Just saving to a single group called `MisK':

(setq gnus-message-archive-group "MisK")

Saving to two groups, `MisK' and `safe':

(setq gnus-message-archive-group '("MisK" "safe"))

Save to different groups based on what group you are in:

(setq gnus-message-archive-group 
      '(("^alt" "sent-to-alt")
        ("mail" "sent-to-mail")
        (".*" "sent-to-misc")))

More complex stuff:

(setq gnus-message-archive-group 
      '((if (message-news-p)
            "misc-news" 
          "misc-mail")))

How about storing all news messages in one file, but storing all mail messages in one file per month:

(setq gnus-message-archive-group
      '((if (message-news-p)
            "misc-news" 
          (concat "mail." (format-time-string 
                           "%Y-%m" (current-time))))))

Now, when you send a message off, it will be stored in the appropriate group. (If you want to disable storing for just one particular message, you can just remove the Gcc header that has been inserted.) The archive group will appear in the group buffer the next time you start Gnus, or the next time you press F in the group buffer. You can enter it and read the articles in it just like you'd read any other group. If the group gets really big and annoying, you can simply rename if (using G r in the group buffer) to something nice---`misc-mail-september-1995', or whatever. New messages will continue to be stored in the old (now empty) group.

That's the default method of archiving sent messages. Gnus also a different way for the people who don't like the default method. In that case you should set gnus-message-archive-group to nil; this will disable archiving.

XEmacs 19.13 doesn't have format-time-string, so you'll have to use a different value for gnus-message-archive-group there.

gnus-outgoing-message-group
All outgoing messages will be put in this group. If you want to store all your outgoing mail and articles in the group `nnml:archive', you set this variable to that value. This variable can also be a list of group names. If you want to have greater control over what group to put each message in, you can set this variable to a function that checks the current newsgroup name and then returns a suitable group name (or list of names). This variable can be used instead of gnus-message-archive-group, but the latter is the preferred method.


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