11.2.8.7 No Gnus

New features in No Gnus:

• Supported Emacs versions The following Emacs versions are supported by No Gnus:
  • Emacs 22 and up
  • XEmacs 21.4
  • XEmacs 21.5
  • SXEmacs
• Installation changes
  • Upgrading from previous (stable) version if you have used No Gnus.

    If you have tried No Gnus (the unstable Gnus branch leading to this release) but went back to a stable version, be careful when upgrading to this version. In particular, you will probably want to remove the ~/News/marks directory (perhaps selectively), so that flags are read from your ~/.newsrc.eld instead of from the stale marks file, where this release will store flags for nntp. See a later entry for more information about nntp marks. Note that downgrading isn’t safe in general.

  • Incompatibility when switching from Emacs 23 to Emacs 22 In Emacs 23, Gnus uses Emacs’s new internal coding system utf-8-emacs for saving articles drafts and ~/.newsrc.eld. These files may not be read correctly in Emacs 22 and below. If you want to use Gnus across different Emacs versions, you may set mm-auto-save-coding-system to emacs-mule.
  • Lisp files are now installed in .../site-lisp/gnus/ by default. It defaulted to .../site-lisp/ formerly. In addition to this, the new installer issues a warning if other Gnus installations which will shadow the latest one are detected. You can then remove those shadows manually or remove them using make remove-installed-shadows.
  • The installation directory name is allowed to have spaces and/or tabs.
• New packages and libraries within Gnus
  • New version of nnimap

    nnimap has been reimplemented in a mostly-compatible way. See the Gnus manual for a description of the new interface. In particular, nnimap-inbox and the client side split method has changed.

  • Gnus includes the Emacs Lisp SASL library.

    This provides a clean API to SASL mechanisms from within Emacs. The user visible aspects of this, compared to the earlier situation, include support for DIGEST-MD5 and NTLM. See Emacs SASL in Emacs SASL.

  • ManageSieve connections uses the SASL library by default.

    The primary change this brings is support for DIGEST-MD5 and NTLM, when the server supports it.

  • Gnus includes a password cache mechanism in password.el.

    It is enabled by default (see password-cache), with a short timeout of 16 seconds (see password-cache-expiry). If PGG is used as the PGP back end, the PGP passphrase is managed by this mechanism. Passwords for ManageSieve connections are managed by this mechanism, after querying the user about whether to do so.

  • Using EasyPG with Gnus When EasyPG, is available, Gnus will use it instead of PGG. EasyPG is an Emacs user interface to GNU Privacy Guard. See EasyPG Assistant user’s manual in EasyPG Assistant user’s manual. EasyPG is included in Emacs 23 and available separately as well.
• Changes in group mode
  • Symbols like gcc-self now have the same precedence rules in gnus-parameters as other “real” variables: The last match wins instead of the first match.
  • Old intermediate incoming mail files (Incoming*) are deleted after a couple of days, not immediately. See Mail Source Customization. (New in Gnus 5.10.10 / No Gnus 0.8)
• Changes in summary and article mode
  • There’s now only one variable that determines how HTML is rendered: mm-text-html-renderer.
  • Gnus now supports sticky article buffers. Those are article buffers that are not reused when you select another article. See Sticky Articles.
  • Gnus can selectively display ‘text/html’ articles with a WWW browser with K H. See MIME Commands.
  • International host names (IDNA) can now be decoded inside article bodies using W i (gnus-summary-idna-message). This requires that GNU Libidn (http://www.gnu.org/software/libidn/) has been installed.
  • The non-ASCII group names handling has been much improved. The back ends that fully support non-ASCII group names are now nntp, nnml, and nnrss. Also the agent, the cache, and the marks features work with those back ends. See Non-ASCII Group Names.
  • Gnus now displays DNS master files sent as text/dns using dns-mode.
  • Gnus supports new limiting commands in the Summary buffer: / r (gnus-summary-limit-to-replied) and / R (gnus-summary-limit-to-recipient). See Limiting.
  • You can now fetch all ticked articles from the server using Y t (gnus-summary-insert-ticked-articles). See Summary Generation Commands.
  • Gnus supports a new sort command in the Summary buffer: C-c C-s C-t (gnus-summary-sort-by-recipient). See Summary Sorting.
  • S/MIME now features LDAP user certificate searches. You need to configure the server in smime-ldap-host-list.
  • URLs inside OpenPGP headers are retrieved and imported to your PGP key ring when you click on them.
  • Picons can be displayed right from the textual address, see gnus-picon-style. See Picons.
  • ANSI SGR control sequences can be transformed using W A.

    ANSI sequences are used in some Chinese hierarchies for highlighting articles (gnus-article-treat-ansi-sequences).

  • Gnus now MIME decodes articles even when they lack "MIME-Version" header. This changes the default of gnus-article-loose-mime.
  • gnus-decay-scores can be a regexp matching score files. For example, set it to ‘\\.ADAPT\\'’ and only adaptive score files will be decayed. See Score Decays.
  • Strings prefixing to the To and Newsgroup headers in summary lines when using gnus-ignored-from-addresses can be customized with gnus-summary-to-prefix and gnus-summary-newsgroup-prefix. See To From Newsgroups.
  • You can replace MIME parts with external bodies. See gnus-mime-replace-part and gnus-article-replace-part. See MIME Commands, Using MIME.
  • The option mm-fill-flowed can be used to disable treatment of format=flowed messages. Also, flowed text is disabled when sending inline PGP signed messages. See Flowed text in The Emacs MIME Manual. (New in Gnus 5.10.7)
  • Now the new command S W (gnus-article-wide-reply-with-original) for a wide reply in the article buffer yanks a text that is in the active region, if it is set, as well as the R (gnus-article-reply-with-original) command. Note that the R command in the article buffer no longer accepts a prefix argument, which was used to make it do a wide reply. See Article Keymap.
  • The new command C-h b (gnus-article-describe-bindings) used in the article buffer now shows not only the article commands but also the real summary commands that are accessible from the article buffer.
• Changes in Message mode
  • Gnus now defaults to saving all outgoing messages in per-month nnfolder archives.
  • Gnus now supports the “hashcash” client puzzle anti-spam mechanism. Use (setq message-generate-hashcash t) to enable. See Hashcash.
  • You can now drag and drop attachments to the Message buffer. See mml-dnd-protocol-alist and mml-dnd-attach-options. See MIME in Message Manual.
  • The option message-yank-empty-prefix now controls how empty lines are prefixed in cited text. See Insertion Variables in Message Manual.
  • Gnus uses narrowing to hide headers in Message buffers. The References header is hidden by default. To make all headers visible, use (setq message-hidden-headers nil). See Message Headers in Message Manual.
  • You can highlight different levels of citations like in the article buffer. See gnus-message-highlight-citation.
  • auto-fill-mode is enabled by default in Message mode. See message-fill-column. See Message Headers in Message Manual.
  • You can now store signature files in a special directory named message-signature-directory.
  • The option message-citation-line-format controls the format of the "Whomever writes:" line. You need to set message-citation-line-function to message-insert-formatted-citation-line as well.
• Changes in Browse Server mode
  • Gnus’ sophisticated subscription methods are now available in Browse Server buffers as well using the variable gnus-browse-subscribe-newsgroup-method.
• Changes in back ends
  • The nntp back end stores article marks in ~/News/marks.

    The directory can be changed using the (customizable) variable nntp-marks-directory, and marks can be disabled using the (back end) variable nntp-marks-is-evil. The advantage of this is that you can copy ~/News/marks (using rsync, scp or whatever) to another Gnus installation, and it will realize what articles you have read and marked. The data in ~/News/marks has priority over the same data in ~/.newsrc.eld.

  • You can import and export your RSS subscriptions from OPML files. See RSS.
  • IMAP identity (RFC 2971) is supported.

    By default, Gnus does not send any information about itself, but you can customize it using the variable nnimap-id.

  • The nnrss back end now supports multilingual text. Non-ASCII group names for the nnrss groups are also supported. See RSS.
  • Retrieving mail with POP3 is supported over SSL/TLS and with StartTLS.
  • The nnml back end allows other compression programs beside gzip for compressed message files. See Mail Spool.
  • The nnml back end supports group compaction.

    This feature, accessible via the functions gnus-group-compact-group (G z in the group buffer) and gnus-server-compact-server (z in the server buffer) renumbers all articles in a group, starting from 1 and removing gaps. As a consequence, you get a correct total article count (until messages are deleted again).

• Appearance
  • The tool bar has been updated to use GNOME icons. You can also customize the tool bars: M-x customize-apropos RET -tool-bar$ should get you started. (Only for Emacs, not in XEmacs.)
  • The tool bar icons are now (de)activated correctly in the group buffer, see the variable gnus-group-update-tool-bar. Its default value depends on your Emacs version.
  • You can change the location of XEmacs’s toolbars in Gnus buffers. See gnus-use-toolbar and message-use-toolbar.
• Miscellaneous changes
  • Having edited the select-method for the foreign server in the server buffer is immediately reflected to the subscription of the groups which use the server in question. For instance, if you change nntp-via-address into ‘bar.example.com’ from ‘foo.example.com’, Gnus will connect to the news host by way of the intermediate host ‘bar.example.com’ from next time.
  • The all.SCORE file can be edited from the group buffer using W e.
  • You can set gnus-mark-copied-or-moved-articles-as-expirable to a non-nil value so that articles that have been read may be marked as expirable automatically when copying or moving them to a group that has auto-expire turned on. The default is nil and copying and moving of articles behave as before; i.e., the expirable marks will be unchanged except that the marks will be removed when copying or moving articles to a group that has not turned auto-expire on. See Expiring Mail.
  • NoCeM support has been removed.
  • Carpal mode has been removed.