Re: gnus trying to read news while I want only mail

[wgreenhouse@riseup.net (W. Greenhouse)]

Hello Luca,

Luca Ferrari <fluca1978@infinito.it> writes:

> Hi,
> I'm moving the first steps into gnus following this tutorial
> http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GnusTutorial, and I've created my
> .gnus.el file with my mail information. I want to use gnus only for
> reading mail, not newsgroup, so I've removed the select-methods
> variables. However, when I start gnus it spins searching for news
> servers. I then set such variables to nil, but an error "attempting to
> use a nil select method" arises. So I tried to point them to localhost
> fake news server, and this made a connection error to raise and asked
> me to continue or not, so I was able to get into gnus at last.
> Is there a way to instrument gnus for not reading news at all?

Yes.  There are at least three options:

1. As described in (info "(gnus) The Empty Backend"), set `nnnil' for a
   select method; this select method is a noop and just silently
   succeeds while returning no new news.  This was an option designed
   for mail-only Gnus users:

   (setq gnus-select-method '(nnnil ""))

2. Start Gnus with M-x gnus-no-server.  This will get new messages from
   the `gnus-secondary-select-methods' while ignoring
   `gnus-select-method'.

3. If you wish to use Gnus for mail only, it is actually perfectly fine
   to use your chosen mail backend as `gnus-select-method' instead of as
   one of the `gnus-secondary-select-methods'.  There is no requirement
   that `gnus-select-method' be a news backend; in fact, aside from a
   few convenience functions, Gnus does not differentiate in its
   handling of "mail", "news", and other sources of messages (e.g. RSS,
   local files, etc.)

   In this configuration, you may also wish to

   (setq gnus-read-newsrc-file nil
         gnus-save-newsrc-file nil)
   
   as there's not much point in creating/using this old-style newsreader
   compatibility file if you are not visiting news servers anyway.

--
Best,
WGG