40.2 When Gnus Starts Up

At startup, Gnus reads your ‘.newsrc’ news initialization file and attempts to communicate with the local news server, which is a repository of news articles. The news server need not be the same computer you are logged in on.

If you start Gnus and connect to the server, but do not see any newsgroups listed in the group buffer, type L or A k to get a listing of all the groups. Then type u to toggle subscription to groups.

The first time you start Gnus, Gnus subscribes you to a few selected groups. All other groups start out as killed groups for you; you can list them with A k. All new groups that subsequently come to exist at the news server become zombie groups for you; type A z to list them. You can subscribe to a group shown in these lists using the u command.

When you quit Gnus with q, it automatically records in your ‘.newsrc’ and ‘.newsrc.eld’ initialization files the subscribed or unsubscribed status of all groups. You should normally not edit these files manually, but you may if you know how.