11.9.2 Introduction

This is the Gnus Frequently Asked Questions list.

Gnus is a Usenet Newsreader and Electronic Mail User Agent implemented as a part of Emacs. It’s been around in some form for almost a decade now, and has been distributed as a standard part of Emacs for much of that time. Gnus 5 is the latest (and greatest) incarnation. The original version was called GNUS, and was written by Masanobu UMEDA. When autumn crept up in ’94, Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen grew bored and decided to rewrite Gnus.

Its biggest strength is the fact that it is extremely customizable. It is somewhat intimidating at first glance, but most of the complexity can be ignored until you’re ready to take advantage of it. If you receive a reasonable volume of e-mail (you’re on various mailing lists), or you would like to read high-volume mailing lists but cannot keep up with them, or read high volume newsgroups or are just bored, then Gnus is what you want.

This FAQ was maintained by Justin Sheehy until March 2002. He would like to thank Steve Baur and Per Abrahamsen for doing a wonderful job with this FAQ before him. We would like to do the same: thanks, Justin!

This version is much nicer than the unofficial hypertext versions that are archived at Utrecht, Oxford, Smart Pages, Ohio State, and other FAQ archives. See the resources question below if you want information on obtaining it in another format.

The information contained here was compiled with the assistance of the Gnus development mailing list, and any errors or misprints are the Gnus team’s fault, sorry.