1.4.3 Filtering New Groups

A nice and portable way to control which new newsgroups should be subscribed (or ignored) is to put an options line at the start of the .newsrc file. Here’s an example:

options -n !alt.all !rec.all sci.all

This line obviously belongs to a serious-minded intellectual scientific person (or she may just be plain old boring), because it says that all groups that have names beginning with ‘alt’ and ‘rec’ should be ignored, and all groups with names beginning with ‘sci’ should be subscribed. Gnus will not use the normal subscription method for subscribing these groups. gnus-subscribe-options-newsgroup-method is used instead. This variable defaults to gnus-subscribe-alphabetically.

The “options -n” format is very simplistic. The syntax above is all that is supports: you can force-subscribe hierarchies, or you can deny hierarchies, and that’s it.

If you don’t want to mess with your .newsrc file, you can just set the two variables gnus-options-subscribe and gnus-options-not-subscribe. These two variables do exactly the same as the .newsrc ‘options -n’ trick. Both are regexps, and if the new group matches the former, it will be unconditionally subscribed, and if it matches the latter, it will be ignored.

Yet another variable that meddles here is gnus-auto-subscribed-groups. It works exactly like gnus-options-subscribe, and is therefore really superfluous, but I thought it would be nice to have two of these. This variable is more meant for setting some ground rules, while the other variable is used more for user fiddling. By default this variable makes all new groups that come from mail back ends (nnml, nnbabyl, nnfolder, nnmbox, nnmh, nnimap, and nnmaildir) subscribed. If you don’t like that, just set this variable to nil.

As if that wasn’t enough, gnus-auto-subscribed-categories also allows you to specify that new groups should be subscribed based on the category their select methods belong to. The default is ‘(mail post-mail)’, meaning that all new groups from mail-like backends should be subscribed automatically.

New groups that match these variables are subscribed using gnus-subscribe-options-newsgroup-method.