Terminology

news

This is what you are supposed to use this thing for - reading news. News is generally fetched from a nearby NNTP server, and is generally publicly available to everybody. If you post news, the entire world is likely to read just what you have written, and they'll all snigger mischievously. Behind your back.

mail

Everything that's delivered to you personally is mail. Some news/mail readers (like Gnus) blur the distinction between mail and news, but there is a difference. Mail is private. News is public. Mailing is not posting, and replying is not following up.

reply

Send a mail to the person who has written what you are reading.

follow up

Post an article to the current newsgroup responding to the article you are reading.

backend

Gnus gets fed articles from a number of backends, both news and mail backends. Gnus does not handle the underlying media, so to speak - this is all done by the backends.

native

Gnus will always use one method (and backend) as the native, or default, way of getting news.

foreign

You can also have any number of foreign groups at the same time. These are groups that use different backends for getting news.

head

The top part of an article, where administration information (etc.) is put.

body

The rest of an article. Everything that is not in the head is in the body.

header

A line from the head of an article.

headers

A collection of such lines, or a collection of heads. Or even a collection of NOV lines.

NOV

When Gnus enters a group, it asks the backend for the headers for all the unread articles in the group. Most servers support the News OverView format, which is much smaller and much faster to read than the normal HEAD format.

level

Each group is subscribed at some level or other (1-9). The ones that have a lower level are "more" subscribed than the groups with a higher level. In fact, groups on levels 1-5 are considered subscribed; 6-7 are unsubscribed; 8 are zombies; and 9 are killed. Commands for listing groups and scanning for new articles will all use the numeric prefix as working level.

killed groups

No information on killed groups is stored or updated, which makes killed groups much easier to handle than subscribed groups.

zombie groups

Just like killed groups, only slightly less dead.

active file

The news server has to keep track of what articles it carries, and what groups exist. All this information in stored in the active file, which is rather large, as you might surmise.

bogus groups

A group that exists in the `.newsrc' file, but isn't known to the server (i. e., it isn't in the active file), is a bogus group. This means that the group probably doesn't exist (any more).