Re: Need help customizing GNUs

[Matthias Mees]

Dan Anderson <dan@mathjunkies.com> wrote:

>         I've just switched  to GNUS from my old  mail and news reader,
> but I'm having some problems getting everything how I want it, and was
> hoping  people on  this  group  would have  answers  to the  following
> questions:

I suppose, basically you need some patience and a lot of spare time for
reading the manual ;-)

> 1.  Changing the Organization: You'll notice that on this article that 
> my organization  is listed as Road  Runner.  I think GNUS  saw that my
> cable modem  is via Road Runner  or something, but I'd  like to change
> it.  Does  anybody know  the variable I  need to  setq in my  .gnus to
> change my organization? 

I guess Gnus gets this from some config file. The variable to setq
should be `message-user-organization'. BTW: You can usually find out
things like that quite easily, just enter `M-x apropos <RET>' and enter
your regexp of choice for searching.

> 2.  Signatures: I know there is  a way to change signatures based upon
> the news group.  Can anybody point me to a good resource on this?

<URL:http://groups.google.com>? Seriously - there's more than one way of
doing that. Probably the best point to start ist the Gnus Manual, which
you should be able to enter via `C-h i g (gnus) <RET>'. Yes, there's a
lot of reading ahead for you, but it'll pay :-) In the end, you'll
probably want Posting Styles, not just for this purpose :-)

> 4.  I see people doing some nifty  box thing.  Can anybody point me to
> the function to do this? 

,----
| Something like this? :-)
`----

That's a feature supplied by an additional package called
boxquote.el. There's lots of stuff like that available for Gnus and/or
Emacs at <URL:http://www.anc.ed.ac.uk/~stephen/emacs/ell.html>.

> 5.  Is it possible to tell GNUs  /NOT/ to expire my old mail messages,
> or -- better yet -- to archive them somewhere?

Erm. Gnus *does* /not/ expire old mail unless you tell Gnus to do
so. See <URL:http://www.gnus.org/manual/gnus_171.html>. Archiving your
mail depends on the mail backend you're using, but AFAIK it is
definitely not a problem. You can even split those messages into groups
to keep your mail archive tidy.

After all, it's Gnus. Everything is possible. :-)

> "I have finally found the One True Newsreader, and it is a glorious
> thing."

Erm. I suggest that you also take a closer look at the manual in terms
of signature-seperation... ;-)

Matthias