6.8 Gnus Unplugged

In olden times (ca. February '88), people used to run their newsreaders on big machines with permanent connections to the net. News transport was dealt with by news servers, and all the newsreaders had to do was to read news. Believe it or not.

Nowadays most people read news and mail at home, and use some sort of modem to connect to the net. To avoid running up huge phone bills, it would be nice to have a way to slurp down all the news and mail, hang up the phone, read for several hours, and then upload any responses you have to make. And then you repeat the procedure.

Of course, you can use news servers for doing this as well. I've used inn together with slurp, pop and sendmail for some years, but doing that's a bore. Moving the news server functionality up to the newsreader makes sense if you're the only person reading news on a machine.

Setting up Gnus as an "offline" newsreader is quite simple. In fact, you don't even have to configure anything.

Of course, to use it as such, you have to learn a few new commands.

6.8.1 Agent Basics		How it all is supposed to work.
6.8.2 Agent Categories		How to tell the Gnus Agent what to download.
6.8.3 Agent Commands		New commands for all the buffers.
6.8.4 Agent Visuals		Ways that the agent may effect your summary buffer.
6.8.5 Agent as Cache		The Agent is a big cache too.
6.8.6 Agent Expiry		How to make old articles go away.
6.8.7 Agent Regeneration		How to recover from lost connections and other accidents.
6.8.8 Agent and IMAP		How to use the Agent with IMAP.
6.8.9 Outgoing Messages		What happens when you post/mail something?
6.8.10 Agent Variables		Customizing is fun.
6.8.11 Example Setup		An example `~/.gnus.el' file for offline people.
6.8.12 Batching Agents		How to fetch news from a cron job.
6.8.13 Agent Caveats		What you think it'll do and what it does.