mysterious zombie groups

mysterious zombie groups

[ArrowHunter]

Hi,

I am fairly new to gnus (and e-macs for that matter).  I have noticed
that my "zombie groups" list contains some newsgroups which I have
never looked at, and never even heard of, in fact.

I first noticed this a little while ago, and at that time I deleted
.newsrc.eld and reset things, but since then some (different) spurious
zombie groups have appeared.

Is this something I should worry about?  Does it mean that my machine
has a security problem?  The machines I access emacs from are shared
in a department.

I have a .authinfo file, but it does not contain my password (I
re-type it every time I log on), and anyway, I have chmodded it to
600.

?

Thanks very much

Re: mysterious zombie groups

[Nevin Kapur]

wp_gibbons@yahoo.co.uk (ArrowHunter) writes:

> I am fairly new to gnus (and e-macs for that matter).  I have noticed
> that my "zombie groups" list contains some newsgroups which I have
> never looked at, and never even heard of, in fact.

[...]

Here's an excerpt from the Gnus manual that might answer your
question:  if you have Gnus check for new groups, they will be made
zombies.

,----
|    Why does Gnus distinguish between zombie and killed groups?  Well,
| when a new group arrives on the server, Gnus by default makes it a
| zombie group.  This means that you are normally not bothered with new
| groups, but you can type `A z' to get a list of all new groups.
| Subscribe the ones you like and kill the ones you don't want.  (`A k'
| shows a list of killed groups.)
`----

-Nevin