Entering groups

Entering groups

[Slackrat]

I'm new to gnus and seem to be having a few problems

Firstly, if my groups are not 'permanently visible' I need to know how      
to make a particular group visible

Secondly, even  if a group is visible, it seems to be impossible to
get into the group to post an article or to send an email if there is
not already at least one post in the group

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated

My emacs configuration file is at http://azurservers.com/gnus in case
any corrections might be necessaery in it

-- 
Regards,
Slackrat
Bill Henderson
[No _4Q_ for direct email]

Re: Entering groups

[Robert D. Crawford]

Slackrat <slackrat4Q@azurservers.com> writes:

> I'm new to gnus and seem to be having a few problems

Let's see if we can clear things up for you.

> Firstly, if my groups are not 'permanently visible' I need to know how      
> to make a particular group visible

One way to do this would be to use the 'L' command to list all groups,
then use C-s to search for the group you wish to enter.

> Secondly, even  if a group is visible, it seems to be impossible to
> get into the group to post an article or to send an email if there is
> not already at least one post in the group

I am not sure why you cannot enter a group with no articles.  If I try
to enter a group with 0 unread articles, it askes me how many articles I
wish to view or something of the kind.  Read on to solve the problem of
article posting you mention.

There is no need to be in a group to post an article to a group.  If in
the Group buffer, hitting 'a' will start a news article.  You can then
enter the name of the group you wish to post to, using the TAB key to
complete the group name.

As far as mail, you can do the same thing, only with the 'm' key from
the Group buffer.

Other things you should know...

C-h m while in the Group/Summary/Article buffers will give you
mode-specific help.  You should read this information, as it is very
helpful and concise.  

Read the gnus info manual.  The info system is very nice.  Learning to
use it will make you very happy.  To get into the gnus info manual, and
any other info manual, use these commands:

C-h i 

this will go to the top level of the info system.  Then you can either
search for "gnus" or you can hit the 'm' key to get to a menu item, in
this case gnus.

> My emacs configuration file is at http://azurservers.com/gnus in case
> any corrections might be necessaery in it

Hopefully, this will not be necessary.

-- 
Robert D. Crawford                                      rdc1x@comcast.net

The girl who remembers her first kiss now has a daughter who can't even
remember her first husband.

Re: Entering groups

[Slackat]

"Robert D. Crawford" <rdc1x@comcast.net> writes:

> Slackrat <slackrat4Q@azurservers.com> writes:
> 
> > I'm new to gnus and seem to be having a few problems
> 
> Let's see if we can clear things up for you.
> 
> > Firstly, if my groups are not 'permanently visible' I need to know how      
> > to make a particular group visible
> 
> One way to do this would be to use the 'L' command to list all groups,
> then use C-s to search for the group you wish to enter.

Thank you for the L/l tip

I wonder how I missed that one since I have spent a considerable
length of time browsing and testing key-bindings

However, I am now running emacs/gnus/w3m/erc under X and it is very
helpful since the menus are quite navigable with the mouse
notwithstanding me being an old CLI afficionado

> 
> > Secondly, even  if a group is visible, it seems to be impossible to
> > get into the group to post an article or to send an email if there is
> > not already at least one post in the group
> 
> I am not sure why you cannot enter a group with no articles.  If I try
> to enter a group with 0 unread articles, it askes me how many articles I
> wish to view or something of the kind.  Read on to solve the problem of
> article posting you mention.
> 
> There is no need to be in a group to post an article to a group.  If in
> the Group buffer, hitting 'a' will start a news article.  You can then
> enter the name of the group you wish to post to, using the TAB key to
> complete the group name.

The UseNet newsgroups are really no problem, but TAB completion does
not seem to work for me. Are there any special pre-requisites?.

And even supposing that it did work, would my Posting Styles to any
particular group be honoured?

> 
> As far as mail, you can do the same thing, only with the 'm' key from
> the Group buffer.
> 

'm' does in fact open up an email template but contains just the
Default information/headers/etc

But having got the L/l as a tool now, it is much easier to use gnus.

However, it is still impossible to enter a group that has no emails in
it

I have overcome this by putting a 'dummy' placeholder in the group
when I subscribe to it, which then creates the group on disk


Perhaps I am tackling the job rongly, but this is what I do:
Take for instance my SPF-VERIFY email group

I knew from the outset that I would from time to time beat out a test
post to verify that my SPF record was OK, so I subscribed to the
group, set up my inbound Mail Split, then my outbound Posting Style.

Upon attempting to enter the group, I cannot because (a) it does not
actually exist on disk and (b), even if it did exist, it would have no
emails in it and so still be unusable for outbound traffic

Solution? Put in the Placeholder as above and everything is just Peachy

EXPIRABLE EMAILS

Expiry is no problem with UseNet groups as a simple Catchup disappears
them and they presumably eventually die a natural death when the nntp
server zaps them

It's a bit of a drag when the server is busy and slow pulling in the
prior items on a busy, long-retention newsgroup such as
rec.bicycles.racing, but I will live with that having enabled that
specific option in my configs myself

However, auto expire ('immediate) on email groups presents a problem.
I don't want to preserve the UCE forwarded from my Toronto FreeNnet
account for any longer than it takes to determine that there are no
desired emails burried in the junk, so I expire it immediately, and
after some investigation discovered (setq nnmail-keep-last-article t) 
which is perfect. Not that I want to post to this particular group,
but I do want to post into other groups that would be treated
similarly

So everything so far is ticking over nicely

BUT

I have (setq nnmail-expiry-target "nnml:mail.graveyard") and trying to
delete the articles/emails in this group with the Backend 'd' merely
appends the whole contents af the group to be appended again to the
end

How do I purge this group please?

Also could you confirm that my Expirable items will disappear in one
week as per the HowTo's I have read, or is there something needs to be
done specifically to enable this instead of relying upon what is said
to be the Default of seven days? 

BROWSING and TEXT RENDERING

This appears in my configs:
;; I WOULD LIKE IT TO ALWAYS USE W3M
;; #################################
;;(setq browse-url-browser-function 'netscape)
;; (setq mm-text-html-renderer 'w3m)
(setq nnmail-text-html-renderer 'w3m)


Now  leaving (setq browse-url-browser-function 'netscape) uncommented
causes gnus to growl at me

Changing it to 'Opera produces similar results

Attempting to modify the code in browse-url.el to work for Opera
produced no results so, since Netscape, Mozilla, FireFox, ThunderBird
and their ilk are banished from my system, I symlinked Opera to
Netscape and can now merrily view URLs contained in inbound items

However, I had no luck with rerndering HTML which is embedded in an
item. W3M is installed and M-x w3m callable. Beautiful, but how do I
get it to render the HTML text within an article or email?

Otherwise I really do not need it since the item can be saved with a
few keystrokes as an .HTML file and viewed by clicking it in
FileRunner, my X replacement for mc


> Other things you should know...
> 
> C-h m while in the Group/Summary/Article buffers will give you
> mode-specific help.  You should read this information, as it is very
> helpful and concise.  

Thanks for the tip
> 
> Read the gnus info manual.  The info system is very nice.  Learning to
> use it will make you very happy.  To get into the gnus info manual, and
> any other info manual, use these commands:
> 
> C-h i 
> 
> this will go to the top level of the info system.  Then you can either
> search for "gnus" or you can hit the 'm' key to get to a menu item, in
> this case gnus.

Been there and got the T-Shirt

I never ask for help until I have INFOd, RTFMd, HOWTO'd, SEARCHd
and IRCd, you may be sure of that.

___
So in actual fact, gnus, erc, w3m and the ide are up and running much
more than acceptably and I am most happy with the results I have
obtained from the hours spent upon the project. I am now really into
the fine tuning stage

-- 
Slackrat
AKA Bill Henderson
[No _4Q_ for direct email]
emacs/gnus config [http://azurservers.com/gnus]

Re: Entering groups

[Adam Sjøgren]

On 05 Dec 2006 19:14:32 +0100, Slackat wrote:

> Upon attempting to enter the group, I cannot because (a) it does not
> actually exist on disk and (b), even if it did exist, it would have no
> emails in it and so still be unusable for outbound traffic

> Solution? Put in the Placeholder as above and everything is just Peachy

Another solution is to put point on the empty group in the *Group*
buffer and go C-u m instead of just m.


  Best regards,

-- 
 "My internal clock is on Tokyo time."                        Adam Sjøgren
                                                         asjo@koldfront.dk

Re: Entering groups

[Gernot Hassenpflug]

asjo@koldfront.dk (Adam Sjøgren) writes:

> On 05 Dec 2006 19:14:32 +0100, Slackat wrote:
>
>> Upon attempting to enter the group, I cannot because (a) it does not
>> actually exist on disk and (b), even if it did exist, it would have no
>> emails in it and so still be unusable for outbound traffic
>
>> Solution? Put in the Placeholder as above and everything is just Peachy
>
> Another solution is to put point on the empty group in the *Group*
> buffer and go C-u m instead of just m.

Control-u followed by RET will enter any group and prompt for the
number of articles to display. If you press enter (default is display
all articles) you will see all articles in an otherwise empty group,
and all read articles along with the unread ones in a non-empty
group. I use that for mail a lot.
-- 
Gernot Hassenpflug (gernot@rish.kyoto-u.ac.jp)      Tel: +81 774 38-3866
JSPS Fellow (Rm.403, RISH, Kyoto Uni.)              Fax: +81 774 31-8463
www.rish.kyoto-u.ac.jp/radar-group/members/gernot   Mob: +81 90 39493924

Re: Entering groups

[Robert D. Crawford]

Slackat <slackrat4Q@azurservers.com> writes:

> Thank you for the L/l tip

No problem.

> However, I am now running emacs/gnus/w3m/erc under X and it is very
> helpful since the menus are quite navigable with the mouse
> notwithstanding me being an old CLI afficionado

Blasphemy!  Using a mouse in emacs... what would rms say?

> The UseNet newsgroups are really no problem, but TAB completion does
> not seem to work for me. Are there any special pre-requisites?.

Not that I can recall.  I've been using this particular set-up for
quite a while now and some of the configuration issues that I might have
run into are long forgotten.  Maybe someone else can shed light on
this. 

> And even supposing that it did work, would my Posting Styles to any
> particular group be honoured?

I can't help you here, as I only use two posting styles, the default and
one in a mail group.  I am not sure if you can change a posting style
after the message buffer is created.

> However, it is still impossible to enter a group that has no emails in
> it

I'm still at a loss here.  I thought about it a bit and I think the
reason I never had this problem might have been that I imported a _lot_
of mail from pine.

> I have overcome this by putting a 'dummy' placeholder in the group
> when I subscribe to it, which then creates the group on disk

As long as there is a workaround.

> I have (setq nnmail-expiry-target "nnml:mail.graveyard") and trying to
> delete the articles/emails in this group with the Backend 'd' merely
> appends the whole contents af the group to be appended again to the
> end

Something that can be taken care of in group parameters?  Not sure, as I
just hold on to the messages for x days and then they are deleted or
not, depending on the group.  If you check this graveyard every x days,
why don't you just set the expiry target to delete and set the wait time
to something reasonable.  

> Also could you confirm that my Expirable items will disappear in one
> week as per the HowTo's I have read, or is there something needs to be
> done specifically to enable this instead of relying upon what is said
> to be the Default of seven days? 

I have never seen anything in gnus that was set as the default that did
not work as advertised.

> BROWSING and TEXT RENDERING
>
> This appears in my configs:
> ;; I WOULD LIKE IT TO ALWAYS USE W3M

For browsing _and_rendering?

> ;;(setq browse-url-browser-function 'netscape)

You do know that this line is commented, right?

I am not sure if this is what you intend.  Check the documentation for
browse-url-browser-function.    The argument should be a function.  If
you are trying to use w3m to browse, set it to w3m-browse-url.

> ;; (setq mm-text-html-renderer 'w3m)

If you wish w3m to render the html mail, this is correct, after you uncomment.

> (setq nnmail-text-html-renderer 'w3m)

I think this might be from a version of gnus  earlier than the one that
I am using.  I looked in my .gnus.el file, one that I have been using
for several versions and I do not see this variable anywhere.Also,
trying to look up that variable returns nothing.

> Now  leaving (setq browse-url-browser-function 'netscape) uncommented
> causes gnus to growl at me
>
> Changing it to 'Opera produces similar results
>
> Attempting to modify the code in browse-url.el to work for Opera
> produced no results so, since Netscape, Mozilla, FireFox, ThunderBird
> and their ilk are banished from my system, I symlinked Opera to
> Netscape and can now merrily view URLs contained in inbound items

Hmmm, forget what I said above.  could it be that 'netscape' is a
function in browse-url that calls netscape with the url?

> However, I had no luck with rerndering HTML which is embedded in an
> item. W3M is installed and M-x w3m callable. Beautiful, but how do I
> get it to render the HTML text within an article or email?

Uncomment (setq mm-text-html-renderer 'w3m) and all should be fine.  

> Otherwise I really do not need it since the item can be saved with a
> few keystrokes as an .HTML file and viewed by clicking it in
> FileRunner, my X replacement for mc

Too many steps.  Not very emacsy.  

> Been there and got the T-Shirt
>
> I never ask for help until I have INFOd, RTFMd, HOWTO'd, SEARCHd
> and IRCd, you may be sure of that.

Right on!  Good to see that there are still people that do not expect
all the answers without putting forth any effort.

> So in actual fact, gnus, erc, w3m and the ide are up and running much
> more than acceptably and I am most happy with the results I have
> obtained from the hours spent upon the project. I am now really into
> the fine tuning stage

This stage never ends.  I use emacs for the _only_ interface to my
computer and have been for a while.  Before that I used it for text and
mail/news.  I still customize things on a pretty regular basis.  You are
not static, why should your editor be?

take care,
rdc
-- 
Robert D. Crawford                                      rdc1x@comcast.net

Please ignore previous fortune.

Re: Entering groups

[David Kastrup]

"Robert D. Crawford" <rdc1x@comcast.net> writes:

> Slackat <slackrat4Q@azurservers.com> writes:
>
>> Thank you for the L/l tip
>
> No problem.
>
>> However, I am now running emacs/gnus/w3m/erc under X and it is very
>> helpful since the menus are quite navigable with the mouse
>> notwithstanding me being an old CLI afficionado
>
> Blasphemy!  Using a mouse in emacs... what would rms say?

Given that he has worked very hard to make this possible, partly by
working himself on it, partly by persuading others, I doubt he'd
complain much.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum

Re: Entering groups

[Robert D. Crawford]

David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> writes:

> "Robert D. Crawford" <rdc1x@comcast.net> writes:
>> Blasphemy!  Using a mouse in emacs... what would rms say?
>
> Given that he has worked very hard to make this possible, partly by
> working himself on it, partly by persuading others, I doubt he'd
> complain much.

I stand educated,  Thanks. 

I still think it is blasphemous.  :}

rdc
-- 
Robert D. Crawford                                      rdc1x@comcast.net

  Referring to a book: I read part of it all the way through.
		-- Samuel Goldwyn

Re: Entering groups

[Hadron Quark]

Slackrat <slackrat4Q@azurservers.com> writes:

> I'm new to gnus and seem to be having a few problems
>
> Firstly, if my groups are not 'permanently visible' I need to know how      
> to make a particular group visible

I use:

(setq gnus-permanently-visible-groups "[nnmaildir,gnu].*") 

>
> Secondly, even  if a group is visible, it seems to be impossible to
> get into the group to post an article or to send an email if there is
> not already at least one post in the group
>
> Any assistance would be greatly appreciated
>
> My emacs configuration file is at http://azurservers.com/gnus in case
> any corrections might be necessaery in it

-- 

Re: Entering groups

[Reiner Steib]

On Sun, Dec 03 2006, Hadron Quark wrote:

| User-Agent: SimnLewis Lithium-p Reader /Gnus No Gnus/Emacs 22.x

If you want to change the User-Agent, please use one conforming to
RFC2616 or the current drafts.  For the statistics, it would be nice
if you could use the default (or remove `system' if you don't want to
expose it).  See `C-h v gnus-user-agent RET'.

> (setq gnus-permanently-visible-groups "[nnmaildir,gnu].*") 

You probably meant "^\\(nnmaildir\\|gnu\\)\\.".

Bye, Reiner.
-- 
       ,,,
      (o o)
---ooO-(_)-Ooo---  |  PGP key available  |  http://rsteib.home.pages.de/

Re: Entering groups

[Hadron Quark]

Reiner Steib <reinersteib+gmane@imap.cc> writes:

> On Sun, Dec 03 2006, Hadron Quark wrote:
>
> | User-Agent: SimnLewis Lithium-p Reader /Gnus No Gnus/Emacs 22.x
>
> If you want to change the User-Agent, please use one conforming to
> RFC2616 or the current drafts.  For the statistics, it would be nice
> if you could use the default (or remove `system' if you don't want to
> expose it).  See `C-h v gnus-user-agent RET'.

That will be coming off, sorry - I was messing with gnushush and forgot
to turn it back off.

>
>> (setq gnus-permanently-visible-groups "[nnmaildir,gnu].*") 
>
> You probably meant "^\\(nnmaildir\\|gnu\\)\\.".

It seems to work ok for me : should I change to your line?

>
> Bye, Reiner.

-- 

Re: Entering groups

[Reiner Steib]

On Mon, Dec 04 2006, Hadron Quark wrote:

> Reiner Steib <reinersteib+gmane@imap.cc> writes:
>> If you want to change the User-Agent, please use one conforming to
>> RFC2616 or the current drafts.  For the statistics, it would be nice
>> if you could use the default (or remove `system' if you don't want to
>> expose it).  See `C-h v gnus-user-agent RET'.
>
> That will be coming off, sorry - I was messing with gnushush and forgot
> to turn it back off.

"User-Agent: No Gnus v0.6" is not valid.  I'd suggest to
  (setq gnus-user-agent '(gnus))
which would result in...

| User-Agent: Gnus/5.110006 (No Gnus v0.6)

>>> (setq gnus-permanently-visible-groups "[nnmaildir,gnu].*") 
>>
>> You probably meant "^\\(nnmaildir\\|gnu\\)\\.".
>
> It seems to work ok for me : should I change to your line?

Your regexp matches every group that contains at least one of the
characters , a d g i l m n r u: "[nnmaildir,gnu].*" = "[,adgilmnru].*".
See (info "(emacs)Regexps").

Bye, Reiner.
-- 
       ,,,
      (o o)
---ooO-(_)-Ooo---  |  PGP key available  |  http://rsteib.home.pages.de/

Re: Entering groups

[Hadron Quark]

Reiner Steib <reinersteib+gmane@imap.cc> writes:

> On Mon, Dec 04 2006, Hadron Quark wrote:
>
>> Reiner Steib <reinersteib+gmane@imap.cc> writes:
>>> If you want to change the User-Agent, please use one conforming to
>>> RFC2616 or the current drafts.  For the statistics, it would be nice
>>> if you could use the default (or remove `system' if you don't want to
>>> expose it).  See `C-h v gnus-user-agent RET'.
>>
>> That will be coming off, sorry - I was messing with gnushush and forgot
>> to turn it back off.
>
> "User-Agent: No Gnus v0.6" is not valid.  I'd suggest to
>   (setq gnus-user-agent '(gnus))
> which would result in...
>
> | User-Agent: Gnus/5.110006 (No Gnus v0.6)
>
>>>> (setq gnus-permanently-visible-groups "[nnmaildir,gnu].*") 
>>>
>>> You probably meant "^\\(nnmaildir\\|gnu\\)\\.".
>>
>> It seems to work ok for me : should I change to your line?
>
> Your regexp matches every group that contains at least one of the
> characters , a d g i l m n r u: "[nnmaildir,gnu].*" = "[,adgilmnru].*".
> See (info "(emacs)Regexps").

This would account for some very strange happenings the past months!!!

Thanks Reiner.