Other Marks ​

There are some marks that have nothing to do with whether the article is read or not.

  • You can set a bookmark in the current article. Say you are reading a long thesis on cats’ urinary tracts, and have to go home for dinner before you’ve finished reading the thesis. You can then set a bookmark in the article, and Gnus will jump to this bookmark the next time it encounters the article. See Setting Marks.
  • All articles that you have replied to or made a followup to (i.e., have answered) will be marked with an ‘A’ in the second column (gnus-replied-mark).
  • All articles that you have forwarded will be marked with an ‘F’ in the second column (gnus-forwarded-mark).
  • Articles stored in the article cache will be marked with an ‘*’ in the second column (gnus-cached-mark). See Article Caching.
  • Articles “saved” (in some manner or other; not necessarily religiously) are marked with an ‘S’ in the second column (gnus-saved-mark).
  • Articles that haven’t been seen before in Gnus by the user are marked with a ‘.’ in the second column (gnus-unseen-mark).
  • When using the Gnus agent (see Agent Basics), articles may be downloaded for unplugged (offline) viewing. If you are using the ‘%O’ spec, these articles get the ‘+’ mark in that spec. (The variable gnus-downloaded-mark controls which character to use.)
  • When using the Gnus agent (see Agent Basics), some articles might not have been downloaded. Such articles cannot be viewed while you are unplugged (offline). If you are using the ‘%O’ spec, these articles get the ‘-’ mark in that spec. (The variable gnus-undownloaded-mark controls which character to use.)
  • The Gnus agent (see Agent Basics) downloads some articles automatically, but it is also possible to explicitly mark articles for download, even if they would not be downloaded automatically. Such explicitly-marked articles get the ‘%’ mark in the first column. (The variable gnus-downloadable-mark controls which character to use.)
  • If the ‘%e’ spec is used, the presence of threads or not will be marked with gnus-not-empty-thread-mark and gnus-empty-thread-mark in the third column, respectively.
  • Finally we have the process mark (gnus-process-mark). A variety of commands react to the presence of the process mark. For instance, X u (gnus-uu-decode-uu) will uudecode and view all articles that have been marked with the process mark. Articles marked with the process mark have a ‘#’ in the second column.

You might have noticed that most of these “non-readedness” marks appear in the second column by default. So if you have a cached, saved, replied article that you have process-marked, what will that look like?

Nothing much. The precedence rules go as follows: process -> cache -> replied -> saved. So if the article is in the cache and is replied, you’ll only see the cache mark and not the replied mark.