News Headers ​

message-required-news-headers a list of header symbols. These headers will either be automatically generated, or, if that’s impossible, they will be prompted for. The following symbols are valid:

From ​

This required header will be filled out with the result of the message-make-from function, which depends on the message-from-style, user-full-name, user-mail-address variables.

Subject ​

This required header will be prompted for if not present already.

Newsgroups ​

This required header says which newsgroups the article is to be posted to. If it isn’t present already, it will be prompted for.

Organization ​

This optional header will be filled out depending on the message-user-organization variable. message-user-organization-file will be used if this variable is t. This variable can also be a string (in which case this string will be used), or it can be a function (which will be called with no parameters and should return a string to be used).

Lines ​

This optional header will be computed by Message.

Message-ID ​

This required header will be generated by Message. A unique ID will be created based on the date, time, user name (for the local part) and the domain part. For the domain part, message will look (in this order) at message-user-fqdn, system-name, mail-host-address and message-user-mail-address (i.e., user-mail-address) until a probably valid fully qualified domain name (FQDN) was found.

User-Agent ​

This optional header will be filled out according to the message-newsreader local variable.

In-Reply-To ​

This optional header is filled out using the Date and From header of the article being replied to.

Expires ​

This extremely optional header will be inserted according to the message-expires variable. It is highly deprecated and shouldn’t be used unless you know what you’re doing.

Distribution ​

This optional header is filled out according to the message-distribution-function variable. It is a deprecated and much misunderstood header.

Path ​

This extremely optional header should probably never be used. However, some very old servers require that this header is present. message-user-path further controls how this Path header is to look. If it is nil, use the server name as the leaf node. If it is a string, use the string. If it is neither a string nor nil, use the user name only. However, it is highly unlikely that you should need to fiddle with this variable at all.

In addition, you can enter conses into this list. The CAR of this cons should be a symbol. This symbol’s name is the name of the header, and the CDR can either be a string to be entered verbatim as the value of this header, or it can be a function to be called. This function should take no arguments, and return a string to be inserted. For instance, if you want to insert Mime-Version: 1.0, you should enter (Mime-Version . "1.0") into the list.

If the list contains a cons where the CAR of the cons is optional, the CDR of this cons will only be inserted if it is non-nil.

If you want to delete an entry from this list, the following Lisp snippet might be useful. Adjust accordingly if you want to remove another element.

emacs-lisp
(setq message-required-news-headers
      (delq 'Message-ID message-required-news-headers))

Other variables for customizing outgoing news articles:

message-ignored-news-headers ​

Regexp of headers to be removed before posting. The default is
‘^NNTP-Posting-Host:\\|^Xref:\\|^[BGF]cc:\\|^Resent-FCC:\\| ^X-Draft-From:\\|^X-Gnus-Agent-Meta-Information:’.

message-default-news-headers ​

This string is inserted at the end of the headers in all message buffers that are initialized as news.