Gnus: Levels, Usenet (publ. 2024-12-06)

Since I use Gnus for so much e-mail processing now, I'm trying to learn more about it — working through the info manual, in particular.

Groups and Levels

Gnus was designed primary as a newsreader (think NNTP, newsgroups, Usenet). When you translate that paradigm to e-mail, you get a sort of "automatic inbox-zero", as the info manual puts it, where things vanish out of sight once you have read them or decide they are not interesting.

BTW, you can mark items with a tick, using gnus-summary-tick-article-forward (!) if you want to prevent something from vanishing. Also, messages that have vanished can be pulled back up at any time with gnus-summary-insert-old-articles (/ o).

I am currently subscribed to 7 or 8 e-mail mailing lists, at least. Using nnimap and splitting, I have most of the mailing lists spilt out into separate groups. This is certainly helpful, but one problem I had was that it was difficult to avoid the habit of constantly checking a group, any time that two or three e-mails came in.

A useful Gnus feature for this is levels. Every group can be set easily to a level between 1 and 5 — using gnus-group-set-current-level (S l) — where a lower number is considered more important. Then, in the group buffer, I can tell Gnus to display only a group level up to a certain number, with gnus-group-list-groups and a interactive parameter, e.g., C-u 3 l. I set my inbox to be level 1 (2 or 3 would also work). I use level 4 for all mailing lists that I like to check once or twice per day. Then I use level 5 for all mailing lists that I like to check only once per week or longer. I set Gnus to start up with only the inbox by setting '(gnus-group-default-list-level 3) and '(gnus-group-use-permanent-levels t) in my Emacs configuration.

So, most of the time I have only my inbox showing, but once or twice a day I'll switch over to level 4. When I am in a summary buffer for a group, I can use gnus-summary-next-unread-article (n) to work through the messages, or gnus-summary-mark-as-read-forward (d) to kill the ones I'm not interested in. If I have no more unread (un-killed) messages in a group, pressing n twice will take me to the next group with unread messages, limited by what groups are currently shown in the group buffer. I'm finding this a very practical approach.

Usenet?

Reading all about NNTP and news in the info manual, I wondered how hard it is to connect to some newsgroups, and to find any interesting content. I learned that from the Group buffer, I can run gnus-group-browse-foreign-server (B), and after entering in "NNTP" and "news.eternal-september.org" I can immediately browse their newsgroups. However, to view other Usenet newsgroups, I had to register at https://news.eternal-september.org/ using my e-mail address. Once they sent me a password, I entered the username and password into my ~/.authinfo file and restarted Emacs, and then I was able to browse all of the Usenet newsgroups, subscribing to the ones I was interested in with gnus-browse-toggle-subscription-at-point (u).

So, now I'm on Usenet, strange as that sounds. Communication seems very similiar to a mailing list, except there are a few extra rules enforced by the server. For example, it will reject posts that have lines longer than 80 characters, and there is some kind of limit on the length of your signature block. A few groups that look interesting initially are comp.emacs, comp.infosystems.gemini, and some of the alt.religion.* groups.

I know there are Gnus plugins for other things like atom feeds so I'm hoping to explore some of those other backends.

Copyright

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