Re: news server account with gnus

[John Mastro <john.b.mastro@gmail.com>]

Matthew Pritchard <wintermute24x7@icloud.com> wrote:
> I have a usenet account with the server beeng news.usenet.net
> <http://news.usenet.net/> port 119,23, or 80 without ssl. The account
> has a username and password. can anyone describe to me how to get this
> to work?

Put this in your init file to tell Gnus about the server:

    (setq gnus-select-method '(nntp "news.usenet.net"))

And create a file ~/.authinfo with contents like:

    machine news.usenet.net login USERNAME password PASSWORD

Replacing USERNAME and PASSWORD as appropriate, of course. That
tells Gnus about the credentials. Make sure only your user can read and
write to it:

    chmod 600 ~/.authinfo

Port 119 is the default for NNTP so that shouldn't require any
configuration.

Hopefully that gets you started. Gnus has good documentation[1] and
there are a number of tutorials out there. Admittedly, it can be an
overwhelming amount of information, but it sounds like you can ignore
everything except NNTP (usenet).

        John

[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/gnus/index.html#Top