Gnus

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For gnus (the animals), see wildebeest.

Gnus (pronounced /gnuz/) is a message reader running under GNU Emacs and XEmacs. It supports reading and composing both news and e-mail. In addition, it is able to use a number of web-based sources as inputs for its groups.

Gnus users find it pleasing to have a system which offers consistent interface between Usenet news and e-mail messages, not to mention the use of their favorite editor GNU/XEmacs for writing messages. The number of features Gnus offers probably is greater than that of any other Mail/News reader.

Note that, as with GNU, the g in Gnus is always pronounced.

1 Features
2 History
- 2.1 Versions
3 See also
4 External links

[edit] Features

Some Gnus features:

simple or advanced mail splitting (automatic sorting of incoming mail to user-defined groups)
incoming mail can be set to expire instead of just plain deletion
custom posting styles (eg. From address, .signature etc) for each group
virtual groups (e.g., directory on the computer can be read as a group)
an advanced message scoring system
user-defined hooks for almost any method (in emacs lisp)
many of the parameters (e.g., expiration, posting style) can be specified individually for all of the groups

Some people say there is no feature (or something similar) in any MUA Gnus doesn't have - or if there isn't one ready, it can be done "easily" with few lines of emacs lisp.

To quote the Gnus Manual:

"You know that Gnus gives you all the opportunity you'd ever want for shooting yourself in the foot. Some people call it flexibility. Gnus is also customizable to a great extent, which means that the user has a say on how Gnus behaves. Other newsreaders might unconditionally shoot you in your foot, but with Gnus, you have a choice!" [1]

[edit] History

Gnus is a rewrite of GNUS written by Masanobu Umeda, which ceased to be developed in 1992. In 1994 Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen started the rewrite under the name ding which is a recursive acronym for ding is not Gnus, intending to produce a version for which the interface and configuration would work almost exactly the same, but the internals would be completely revamped and improved.

[edit] Versions

The following versions have been released since then:

Gnus 5 ((ding) Gnus) - November 1995
Gnus 5.2 (September Gnus) - May 1996
Gnus 5.4 (Red Gnus) - January 25, 1997
Gnus 5.6 (Quassia Gnus) - March 8, 1998
Gnus 5.8 (Pterodactyl Gnus) - December 3, 1999
Gnus 5.10 (Oort Gnus) - May 1, 2003

The named versions (whose first letters run backwards in the alphabet) are development versions, of "alpha" quality.

The current development version which will be released as Gnus 5.12 is called No Gnus.

The odd version numbers, like 5.3 and 5.5 are for the Gnus versions bundled with GNU Emacs. The even version numbers are the unbundled releases. So for example, Gnus 5.5 is similar to Gnus 5.4, but bundled with Emacs 20.1.