My first article with Gnus, eventually...

[Francis Moreau]

Hello,

OK, I finally managed to send my first articles and emails using Gnus
and must admit that it's not quite simple. Is the whole thing is over
engineered, well I dunno for now but it's definitely not for someone
who wants to get things works in a short time. BTW, I read in the Gnus
info that newsgroups is generally not used because using forums is so
much simpler. Hell no, I did subscribe to newsgroup by using
Thunderbird and it took me 1 minute, really. But I must admit that I
don't know if Thunderbird handles correctly expirity and all those
things you can customize in Gnus.

Anyways, just to sum up my background, I'm new to newsgroups (I used
to subscribe to several mailing list), I use to using Mutt as email
agent and I read a big part of Gnus info. But I find it pretty hard to
read, probably because I'm a noob; and it's not very easy to find a
specific information in it except if you learn it by reading it 100
times. Oh yes, I'm using Emacs (hence Gnus) in console mode.

What about the key bindings ? Well, It seems I need a lot of avalaible
space in my brain to learn all of them. Mainly because they are very
illogical: for instance, to process mark all articles in the current
thread, use 'M P t' and in order to unmark: 'M P T'. Ok t->T for the
opposite operation, easy. Let's take a look to the key binding for
process marking by subject: 'M P R'... what's ? an 'r' in upper case !
So how do I unmark by subject: 'M P G', ouch !

But I'm sure I'm missing some stuff that would make me love Gnus. So
to improve my feeling, here are a couple of questions:

  - To save very interesting articles or mails, I use to creating some
    folders (with logical topic names) and burry these articles in
    them. In Gnus should I create a new group instead and copy/move
    article in them ? If so how should I create those groups ?

    Also in those groups, it makes no sense to make any of these
    articles expirable or invisible after reading them.

  - I'd like to get a copy of the mail I send to my mail box instead
    of archiving them in a 'Sent' mail box. How can I do that ? Of
    course this doesn't apply for news groups.

  - I setup Gmane a my primary news server. Is that a good choice or
    are there some better server ?

  - Attachments. Not really clear for now but the only way I find to
    see if a mail has an attachment is to open the mail, go down to
    the body of the article and see if Gnus has displayed
    something. Is it possible to make this info appear in the summary
    buffer line ? Also make it appears in the article buffer after the
    header. Currently it's after the body.

  - Visit URLs inside articles. ISTR, I read something about that in
    the info but can't find it anymore.

  - I like when my summary buffer look like a 'salad fruit'. How can I
    replace the current line cursor mark '=>' with nothing but instead
    highlight the whole current line ?

  - Could someone share their buffer/group line formats which are well
    suited for console mode usage ? Or is there a place which collect
    some .gnus files as templates or examples.

  - When I post an article to a newsgroup, the news server put my IP
    of the machine I used to post this article. Is it possible to
    prevent this from happening ?

  - If I want to recover some very old articles which are surely
    expired in all 'classical' news servers. Is there a suited place
    where I can retrieve them ?

  - Sometimes I send email directly from the shell prompt:

                 echo "A short line" | mail <address>

    How can I do this with Gnus ?
    
  - When I tried to open a file or save an article from Gnus, the
    default directory is always /usr/share/info which pretty
    useless. How can I change this to setup the current directory Gnus
    is running ?

Of course there are plenty of useful things I can also do. But as
usual, only bad things show up ;)

Thanks

Francis