EECS Introduction to PINE

Newsgroup Features

compose-sets-newsgroup-without-confirm

This feature controls one aspect of Pine's Composer. If you enter the composer while reading a news group, you will normally be prompted to determine whether you intend the new message to be posted to the current newsgroup or not. If this feature is set, Pine will not prompt you in this situation, and will assume that you do indeed wish to post to the newsgroup you are reading.

news-approximates-new-status

This feature causes certain messages to be marked as "New" in the Folder Index of news groups.

When opening a news group, Pine will consult your "newsrc" file and determine the last message you have previously disposed of via the "D" key. If this feature is set, any subsequent messages will be shown in the Index with an "N", and the first of these messages will be highlighted. Although this is only an approximation of true "New" or "unseen" status, it provides a useful cue to distinguish more-or-less recent messages from those you have seen previously, but are not yet ready to mark deleted.

Background: your "newsrc" file (used to store message status information for news groups) is only capable of storing a single flag, and Pine uses this to record whether or not you are "done with" a message, as indicated by marking the message as "Deleted". Unfortunately, this means that Pine has no way to record exactly which messages you have previously seen, so it normally does not show the "N" status flag for any messages in a news group. This feature enables a starting *approximation* of seen/unseen status that may be useful.

news-read-in-newsrc-order

This feature controls the order that news groups will be presented. If set, they will be presented in the same order as they occur in your .newsrc file (or \NEWSRC file in the case of PC-Pine). If not set, the newsgroups will be presented in alphabetical order.

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