# The first start

You find &knode; in the K Menu under the entry Internet. The menu entry KNode launches the program.

If the entry for &knode; can not be found or if &knode; should not appear on the desktop after clicking on the menu entry, read Questions and Answers.

The main window of &knode; should now be displayed on your desktop as shown. On first start, the settings dialog will be invoked.

Setting up &knode;
&knode; after first start

&knode; after first start

The windows shows the menu bar, the toolbar below and the status pane at the buttom. The area between the toolbar and the status pane is occupied by a three-part windows.

There is a folder view, which currently contains only three entries:

- The folderOutbox
- The folderDrafts
- The folderSent

When &knode; is completely and correctly configured, the news servers and the subscribed news groups will appear there.

In the upper section, is the article view. It is currently empty and does not show any articles. Directly below the article view, the article window is located. The body of the currently selected article appears there. These windows are also blank at the moment, as there are no articles, of course. You should not be confused because before reading and publishing news, some things have to be configured. This will be covered by the following section.

We are now beginning the setting up of &knode;. Most settings are not important for daily use, but you should know what settings are possible and what they are for. Some may miss a Quickstart chapter but those who prefer a quick start will just glance over the manual anyway. For others, especially those who have not any or much experience with a news reader, this chapter offers the chance to fully perform the configuration, although some things may become clear only later on.

## Personal settings

Via Settings Configure KNode... you will enter the preferences dialog of &knode;. The figure shows the dialog.

Dialog for entering personal information
Entering personal information

Entering personal information

The dialog is divided into two parts: There is a treeview, in which the top entry Identity is already highlighted. In the other, you see the corresponding input dialog. These settings relate to your identity with which you navigate through the newsgroups.

If you have already configured your personal settings in the &kcontrolcenter; before the first start of &knode;, they will be adopted.

### Name

In the field Name you enter your name, ⪚ Joe Miller or Mary Gordon. This name will later appear in the newsgroups as sender, and can be seen by anyone.

Filling out the field Name is mandatory.

In most newsgroups, it is considered polite and appropriate to appear with one's real name. Other newsgroups are less strict about this. But there are also cases when one would not want to appear with one's real name, ⪚ in newsgroups where one would like to (and can) talk about very personal matters without being exposed. These groups mostly do tell you in their Charter that the anonymity of their members is explicitly approved.

For those special cases, &knode; offers settings that can be adjusted to each newsgroup individually. Further information can be found under Group local Identities.

### Organization

The input field Organization is optional and does not have to be filled out. You can enter ⪚ the name of your company or your university institute, if you use &knode; there. If you leave this field blank, it will often be filled out later by your Internet provider.

### Email address

The email adress you enter here will be used as sender in news articles, &ie; as actual address of the author, in conjunction with the real name (set in the field Name).

The field Email Address shows up when someone wants to reply to you by email. The email will be sent to the address entered here. Many newsreaders display the sender address together with the name in the Header of the article.

Filling out the field Email Address is mandatory.

Note that the e-mail address will only be used for replies to you if the field Reply-to Address is not filled out. In this case, the field Email will be ignored for replies and the address given under Reply-to Address will be used.

### Reply-to Address

Reply-to Address offers you the possibility to enter a different address than your sender e-mail address. If someone replies to you by email, this address will be displayed as target address in the reply. An example for using Reply-to Address would be that you write the article at the office during the day but want to receive the answer in your home inbox, because your boss co-reads your mail.

Only enter an e-mail address in that field if it actually differs from the field Email Address.

Some news readers deliberately set this to an invalid e-mail address in order to prevent spam mails from being received. What could happen though is that a reader sends an e-mail to this invalid address which you will therefore never receive. You should drop a note about this in the signature.

### Mail-Copies-To

If you enter an email address here, every article will be sent to the usenet and to this email address.

### Signing Key

If you have configured the use of PGP or GnuPG you can chose your signing key with Change....

### Use a signature from file

If this option is selected, the file specified under Signature File will be used as Signature.

### Signature File

The field Signature File determines the file, the content of which is appended to each of your articles. The field is only enabled if the option Use a signature from file is selected.

The signature file is a simple text file, which should not contain more than four lines. It can for example contain a reference to your homepage with the corresponding link, your postal address with your telephone number (which would then be of course visible to the whole world with every article) or just a cool quote. The signature is your brand, so to speak, which will mark all your articles. Therefore your signature should be designed sloppily or in the long run annoying to others. An old joke that one would have to read over and over again does not foster sympathy or the interes of the other newsgroup subscribers.

You can directly enter the file name of the signature file but it is more convenient to use the button Choose.... This opens a file open dialog and you can conveniently choose the signature file with the mouse. The button Edit File enables you, after choosing the file, to edit the signature.

It is not neccessary to include a separation line in the signature file as &knode; inserts it automatically.

### The file is a program

If this option is activated, the signature file is not handled as a text file, but as a program. The signature file will be started as a program and the output will be used as a signature. Through that you'll be able to chose a signature by accident or to use fortune to generate a cool slogan every time.

### Specify signature below

If this option is selected you can enter the text of the signature directly in the input field below.

Please make sure that in this case also your signature should not contain more than 4 lines. A separation line is not neccesary as &knode; inserts it automatically.

### General notes

You can later adapt the identity individually for each of the subscribed groups via the Preferences dialog, ⪚ you can specify an English signature for English groups and a German one for German groups. Apart from the language it is also possible to have context-sensitive signatures, ⪚ your favorite recipe in a cooking group or the names of your twelve cats in a cat owner group.

You find more in the section Group local identities.

The next step in the configuration covers the news account.

## Configuring the news account

Now we must tell &knode; about where we get the news from or where to send the articless to later on. In the tree view on the right, there is an entry Accounts. Click on that with the mouse. Then two sub entries will be opened out. We choose the entry News, because we first want to configure the news account. The list of accounts is still empty.

Create a new account with New.... The following dialog appears:

The dialog New Account
The dialog New Account

The dialog New Account

### Name

The field Name can be filled in as you like. The text you enter will later be visible in the folder view. You can ⪚ enter the name of your Internet Provider. For our example we enter the name `My News Account`.

### Server

The next field is labelled Server. Unlike the field Name, it is important what you enter here. The name of the news server is fixed and should be made public by your internet provider. If you do not know the name of the news server, you should get it now. Without this information you can not read any news. If your internet provider hasn't an own newsserver you can use a public one. Universities often provide public news servers.

For our example configuration we enter the name `news.server.com`. You will of course enter the real name of your news server.

If you deploy &knode; with a local news server, enter the name `localhost` here!

### Port

Port, the next field, has already a default value. The Port designates, roughly speaking, a data channel, on which the server listens, whether someone wants to retrieve news. It defaults to the value 119, which is applicable in most cases. Therefore we do not change this default for our example.

### Hold connection for

The time value you enter here is effective if you have established a connection to the news server and if, for whatever reason, no data is received from or transmitted to the news server. After the specified time has expired, &knode; automatically disconnects. This, among other things, relieves the server of unneccessay connections which reduce its availibilty for other subscribers. It also makes sure that an automatically established Internet connection is not held unnecessarily although no data is being sent or received.

This settings mainly makes sense if one receives and reads news online. For local news servers it is of almost no importance. If this waiting time is set too low, there can be waiting periods if you read a longer article and do not do anything for some time. &knode; has cancelled the connection to the server by then after the period has expired and has to reestablish it.

If this waiting time is set too high, you perhaps waste online time when doing nothing.

### Timeout

If &knode; connects to the news server, it waits no longer for an answer of the news server than the time that is set here. If this period is exceeded, you will get a corresponding error message, because the server does not respond and &knode; cancels the connection attempt.

Depending on the quality of your Internet account and the news server's current load. there can be waiting periods, so that &knode; cancels the connection. If this happens frequently, you should set this setting to a higher value.

### Fetch group descriptions

If this setting is selected, &knode; additionally requests the available group descriptions. They will be displayed in the dialog Subscribe to Newsgroups.

There is not a group description for every group, so there is no error if no group description is shown when subscribing to a group later on.

### Server requires authentication

The option Server requires authentication needs only to be selected if your news server requires a user name and a password when retrieving articles. If this is the case, you will find out from your Internet provider or the server's maintainer.

If you do not know exactly if this setting is necessary, forget about selecting it. If you encounter an error later on, you still can select it then. Otherwise select this option and enter your user name under User and the associated password under Password.

### General notes

By now you have completed the setup of your news account. You confirm and save your settings by clicking on the button OK. As soon as you have done that, the account will appear in the list by the name that you have entered in Name before. And if you have a close look, you will see that the account is also appearing in the folder view.

Via the button Subscribe you can perhaps directly get to the dialog for subscribing to news groups. But we still have more to do and ignore it for now. There are several ways that lead to the goal.

In the chapter Managing multiple news accounts you will learn how to work with multiple news accounts. But first, we will stay with this one. In most cases, one account is sufficient.

Please note that some Internet providers only allow retrieving news if you are logged on via this provider.

We will now move on to configuring the email account. In order to do that, click on the entry Mail in the tree view on the left.

## Setting up the mail account

After selecting Mail in the tree view, the following Dialog Box appears.

Dialog Box for setting up the mail account
Setting up the mail account

Setting up the mail account

You will notice this Dialog Box to be very similar to the news account settings Dialog Box. But why do we need an email account in a newsreader?

Sometimes you need to anwser to the author of an article directly, without posting to the newsgroup. For example, when you want to make a very personal comment or want to correct an error. Sometimes a dialog is more appropriate than a public remark.

Thats why &knode; provides the posssibility to reply by email. If you want to use this feature, you must tell &knode; how to send emails. You just need to insert the mailserver. When you have already configured an email account, &ie; with &kmail;, you can reuse the settings used there.

### Use external mail program

If this option is active, &knode; will use the mail program which is configured in the control-center. The other options in this dialog will be disabled.

### Server

The name of your mail server is not arbitrary. Your ISP , should provide you the informations, which mail server to use. All you have to do here is to enter the mailserver in the Server field.

In our example we enter`mail.server.de`

If you have one, you can send your mail via a local mail server. When you use a local mail server, use localhost in the Server field.

### Port

Again, the Port field has a default value. In this case it Port 25. You should not need to change this, despite your ISP has a very exotic configuration and tells you to do so. We do not change this for the example.

### Hold connection for

This value is important, after you established a connection with your mail server. If there is no data transfer, &knode; cancels the connection to your mailserver after this amount of time.

### Timeout

When &knode; tries to connect to the mail server, it waits this long for a reply by the the server. Is this time execceded, you get a error message.

Depending on the quality of your connnection and the actual load of your mail server, you can get long reply times. If &knode; cancels the connection due to this, you should increase the timeout.

### General notes

Some ISP only allow you to send email over their mailserver after you checked your mailbox on new mails. This reduces spamming.

For same reasons, some ISP only allow you to send mail by their mailservers, when you are online with this ISP or if you are logged in at the mailserver. For example, this is the normal configuration at GMX and isn't supported by &knode; or &kmail; yet.

## Defining the appearance

With the dialog Appearance you are given the ability to set the colors, the character code and the font size of the texts in the article window. The picture below shows the dialog.

Setting up the dialog Appearance
Setting up the dialog Appearance

Setting up the dialog Appearance

### Use custom colors

If you select this option, you can adjust the color settings of &knode; in the list field below. To change a color setting, do a double click with the &LMB; on the list entry to open the &kde; color selection dialog.

The color selection can only be configured after the checkbox has been checked — otherwise, a double click on the list entries won't do anything.

If the setting Use custom colors is selected, &knode; won't use colors which have been changed later globally for &kde; but will only use the colors defined here instead.

### Use custom fonts

If you select this setting, you can adjust the fonts which &knode; uses for the display in the list field below. To choose a font, do a double click with the &LMB; on the list entry to open the &kde; font selection dialog.

The font can only be configured after the checkbox has been checked - otherwise, a double click on the list entries won't do anything.

If the setting Use custom fonts is selected, &knode; won't use later changes to the global font settings for &kde; but will use the fonts defined here instead.

## General News Settings

Now click on Reading news and then on the subentry General. The picture shows the dialog and the preferences you can configure there.

Dialog General Preferences
The dialog General Preferences

The dialog General Preferences

You don't need to change most of these settings, but we will discuss them step by step to give you an overview over the possibilities of &knode;.

### Check for new articles automatically

If this box is checked, &knode; tries to request new articles from the server when selecting a newsgroup. These settings especially make sense when you use &knode; together with a local news server. Downloading the messages obviously only works when the server is reachable. For a server which is only reachable via an Internet connection, this setting rarely makes sense and should stay deactivated.

If your system isn't set up to establish an Internet connection if neccessary, you will get an error message each time you select a newsgroup.

If you want to keep control over when a connection to the server is established, the menu option Group Get new articles is appropriate.

### Maximal number of articles to fetch

This sets the restriction of the articles, which are requested from the server while downloading. The value configured here is for each Newsgroup seperately. Set this for instance to 300, so that only the 300 newest articles of the newsgroup are requested. Other articles are discarded!

For newsgroups with relatively high traffic you might lose articles if this value is too low. This especially occurs when you've just subscribed to a newsgroup or download articles only occasionally and the traffic for this reason rises above the value specified here.

### Mark article as read after

Articles you have opened in the article window are marked as read after the number of seconds specified here. If you set this value relatively high, you avoid that an articles you just glanced at is directly marked as read. On the other hand it can be annoying for relatively short articles for which you need less time to read than specified. If you browse in this case too fast through the articles they stay, although you've read them already, unread. Therefore, you should adjust this value to your personal preferences.

### Mark crossposted articles as read

Sometimes an article will be posted to more than one group. That's called crossposting. If you activate this option, those crossposted articles will be marked as read in all newsgroups if you read it in one newsgroup.

### Smart scrolling

If this option is active, the lines are scrolled soft instead of jerky.

### Show whole thread on expanding

This setting lets discussion be displayed completely (over multiple answer levels) if you click on the plus in front of the discussion. If this setting isn't checked, only the immediate answers to the current article are displayed.

### Default to expanded threads

Here you can toggle if the threads are expanded by default or if they aren't.

### Show article score

This toggles on and off the column for the scoring at the article view.

### Show line count

Here you can toggle the column with the number of lines on and off.

### Cache size for headers

Here you can configure how much memory should be used for caching the headers.

### Cache size for articles

Here you can configure, how much memory &knode; should use for the caching of the articles.

## Navigation

Here you can change some navigation properties of &knode; Normally everything here is switched off, but if you don't like this kind of navigation you can change it.

### General

The keyboard behavior between &knode; and &kmail; is a bit different. With the switch Emulate the keyboard behaviour of KMail you can activate the same keyboard behaviour as in &kmail; for &knode;.

### Mark All as Read

If the box Switch to next group is checked, &knode; automatically switches to thenext group if you mark all articles as read.

### Mark Thread as Read

If the box Close the current threadis checked, &knode; automatically closes the actual thread if you mark this thread as read.

If the box Go to next unread thread is checked, &knode; automatically shows the next thread if you mark the actual thread as read.

### Ignore Thread

If the box Close the current threadis checked, &knode; automatically closes the actual thread if you ignore this thread.

If the box Go to next unread thread is checked, &knode; automatically shows the next thread if you ignore this thread.

## Scoring rules

To sort the articles you have the possibility to score them. The standard score is 0, a higher score means, that the article is interesting, a lower score means it's boring.

In the middle of the window you see a big, white area. Here you can see your scoring rules. Scoring rules are used by &knode; to score the incoming articles automatically. If for example a person always posts nonsense you can automatically score the articles of that person down and hide them.

With the buttons below the list of scoring-rules you can edit, add, remove and copy a rule. We will skip this feature for now, because it is not essential for the setup of &knode;.

You will learn more about scoring; in the chapter Scoring, watching and ignoring.

### Default score for ignored threads

Normally you only need the functions ignore and watch. This simply shows if a thread is interesting or not. Here you can configure a default score for the ignored threads. Choosing the menu item Scoring Ignore Thread will give this score to all the posts in that thread, and will apply that score also to future posts that follow up the thread.

### Default score for watched threads

If an article is interisting, it will get a score above 0. Here you can enter the default score for those articles. Choosing the menu item Scoring Watch Thread will give this score to all the posts in that thread, and will apply that score also to future posts that follow up the thread.

You can use the W key to watch a thread or the I key to ignore it.

## Filter settings

This screenshot shows the filter settings.

The filter settings
The filter settings

The filter settings

This dialog shows two lists. The upper list, labeled Filters, shows all defined filters. When you use &knode; for the first time, you only see the predefined filters.

With the buttons Add, Delete, Edit and Copy you can add new filters or delete filters no longer needed. We skip this feature for now, because it is not essential for the setup of &knode;

You can find more detailed informations about filters in Definig and using filters.

The lower list, labeled Menu, shows the appearance of the menu View Filter, which you can reach from the menu bar. The order of the filters in the this menu can be configured in this list.

The button Up shifts the selected filter one position up. Try it, select the second filter and press Up. This entry goes up one position.

The button Down does the opposite action. Select the filter, you just shifted one up, and pressDown until it reaches its old position.

With the two buttons Add Separator and Remove Separator you can group the filters optically. The separators are shown as `====` in the list. In the Menu they show up as some more appealing horizontal lines. Try to add a separator. Then you select the seperator and remove it by pressing Remove seperator wider.

Any changes you make here, you can see in View Filter after closing this dialog.

## Customize displayed article headers

In this dialog, you can set how the single header lines are displayed in the article window.

The dialog Customize displayed article headers
The dialog Customize displayed article headers

The dialog Customize displayed article headers

This list shows all the header lines which are intended for display in the article window. The identifier at the left will be displayed, the name in < > stand for the name of the according header line how it is transmitted in the Usenet, &ie; for From the name From.

Via Edit you can influence the shown identifier as well as the attributes of the shown identifier and the text. To make things clearer, we'll now simply select the entry From:<From> in the list and open the dialog for editing the header display by clicking on Edit.

The dialog Header Properties
The dialog Header Properties

The dialog Header Properties

### Header

The selection box Header shows the entry From. That is the name of the header line for the sender, as it's actually present in the article and evaluated by the newsreader. If you drop down the selection box, &knode; shows a range of other identifiers, which stand all for a certain header line in the article. For now, we'll leave the identifier From configured. We'll work with this list later, when we add a header line to the display.

### Displayed Name

This field holds the name, which is later shown in the article window as a replacement for the actual identifier of the header line. For the header line From, it's the from. If you leave this field blank, only the content of the header line appears in the article window. This is for example the default setting for the header line Subject. We won't change anything here either, for now.

### Name

Here you can influence the attributes of the shown name with the checkboxes. In our case, the attribute Bold is selected for the name From, &ie; the text will be shown in bold letters in the article window. Of course, you can combine different attributes, for example Bold and Underlined.

### Value

The information given for Name is true for these checkboxes as well, but these attributes are associated to the content of the shown header line, in course case to the actual sender. You can later see the effects of these settings in the displayed articles. For example, select here the entry Italic, and the sender, &ie; John Doe <johndoe@doubleguns.com> appears in an italic font.

### Add and remove header lines to the display

To explain the possibilities of this dialog to you, we're going to add a new header line to the display.

Show the newsreader used for a post in the article window

This pictures show the dialog with the header line `X-Newsreader`.

The dialog Header Properties
The dialog Header Properties

The dialog Header Properties

It would be nice if one could see which newsreader another subscriber uses in the article window. Well, that's pretty easy because there's actually a (optional) header line which contains that information.

Drop down the selection field Header and select the entry X-Newsreader from the list.

In the field Displayed name, enter `Newsreader`.

Now you can select any attribute for the display of the field and it's content. Next, acknowledge your input with the OK. The new header line appers now in the list and will later be shown in the article window.

Use the up and Down buttons to arrange the order of the headers in the article window.

The statement that the new header line will be shown in the article window is actually pretty optimistic, because the entry X-Newsreader isn't required for Usenet artciles. Therefore, not all articles will contain that header line. If the line doesn't exist, the according entry simply won't be shown. You will get more informationen about headers at http://www.kirchwitz.de/~amk/dni/headerzeilen (german)

## Viewer

### Show fancy header decorations

If this is active, the headers will be beautified a bit. Otherwise only the plain text is shown.

### Rewrap text when necessary

If this option is active, the text-wrapping in the viewer will automatically corrected.

### Remove trailing empty lines

If this is active, empty lines at the end of the article will automatically hidden.

### Show signature

If this setting is activated, the signature of the sender is displayed in the article window, if it isn't, the signature is surpressed.

Please notice that &knode; can display the signature correctly only if it can be seperated correctly from the article content in the current article. There are newsreaders which do this seperation incorrectly. Two - with a following (space) are correct.

Many participants in the newsgroups give hints on their homepage or intentionally erroneous specified Email adresses in the header in the signature. If you disable displaying the signature, you might loose this information. On the other hand you might save yourself from reading strange quotes.

### Interpret text format tags

If this is active, all text format tags in the message like `*bold*`, `/italic/` and `_underline_` are shown directly in the viewer. These text format tags are an unofficial standard.

### Recognized quote characters

To display the quoted text in another size or colour, &knode; needs to recognize that it's quoted text. Quoted text is normally marked with a > at the beginning of the line, but sometimes there are other characters. In this field you can enter all characters that should mark quoted text.

### Show attachments inline if possible

If this setting is marked, &knode; tries to display the contents of possible attachment directly in the window when opening an article. For instance, a picture would be displayed directly below the article text.

Additionally, you have the possibility to save the attachment or open it with the application you have associated with the MIME type of the attachment by using the context menu.

### Open attachments on click

If this box is checked, attachments are opened with an external program with is configured for the MIME type. If there is no such association, a dialog for saving a file is opened and you can save the attachment in a separate file.

### Show alternative contents as attachments

Articles which are sent as Multipart MIME contain the text of the message in multiple formats, for example as raw text and HTML. The newsreader decides which part of the article is displayed. This setting makes it possible that the other formats can be opened as if they were attachments with a mouse click.

If this setting is disabled, alternative contents are not displayed.

### Open links with

Here you can select which browser is used for displaying links you clicked on in a message. Currently, you can either select the Netscape Navigator or the default, &konqueror;. The selected browser has to be installed, of course.

## Settings for publishing articles

When you post articles with &knode; the settings in the following Dialog Box is used.

The Dialog Box Technical Settings
The Dialog Box Technical Settings

The Dialog Box Technical Settings

When you choose the wrong settings here, your articles can be unreadable or not sendable at all. So please be careful with these settings.

### Charset

Here you can choose the charset used for encoding your articles. Normally this is US-ASCII for english speaking countries, but your charset may differ. The default is the charset used in your global &kde; settings, so you should not have to change this.

When you want to post articles in newsgroups with other charsets (⪚ eastern european or asian) you can set the required charset here.

### Encoding

Here you set the encoding of the characters for the message transfer. You can choose between 8-bit and 7-bit (quoted-printable).

When you choose 8-bit encoding, most special characters are transfered correctly. This is for example the normal option for the German groups (de.*).

When you choose quoted-printable, 8-bit charcters (⪚ german umlauts or special characters) are send as encoded 7-bit charcaters.

In the English newsgroups the 7-bit-coding is quite normal.

### Use own default charset when replying

If this option is active, &knode; uses your default charset for replying instead of the charset of the article you're answering on.

### generate Message-ID

When this is active, &knode; generates its own Message-IDs for all articles you post.

The Message-ID must be unique worldwide! There would otherwise be collisions between messages with the same Message-ID. The news server will reject the second article, because it thinks, this article was already recieved.

A Message-ID consists of a valid FQDN (Full Qualified Domain Name). This means it looks similar to an email adress with a identification before the `@` and the domain.

The identification is generated by &knode; automatically, but you must provide a valid domain name in Hostname When you do not have your own domain, you should not activate this option. Let the newsserver generate a Message-ID for you.

Message-ID

An example for a valid domain would be: `kde.org`. A Message-ID gernerated with this domain will look like:

    934lek9934@kde.org

An unique identification is only guarenteed, when you have your own domain. Even when you do not use &knode; for generating your Message-IDs there may be collisions, when you are using a local newsserver. For example leafnode generates a Message-ID which it derives from the local hostname.

You'll get more information about this and an own free domain at http://www.qad.org/faq/faq-messageid.html.

### Hostname

Here you enter the Hostname of your computer. This is used to generate the Message-ID. When you do not have your own domain, you should not activate this option. Let the newsserver generate a Message-ID for you. Using the example above this would be: `kde.org`.

### X-Headers

Here you can enter X-Headers, which are not provided by &knode; For example: `X-No-Archive: yes`. This should prevent your articles to be archived by archive services such as Google.

X-Headers are experimental headers, wich are not included in the standard for Internet-Messages. They are, for example, used for extended information transfer. To prevent collisions with later standard headers, they have a X- prefix.

### don't add the "User-Agent" identification header

When this option is checked, &knode; does not include the corresponding line in the Header before posting.

This header is used for identification of the newsreader the article was written in. Besides statistical reasons, this allows to identify non-standard newsreaders. You should not activate this option, &knode; has no need to hide.

## The Composer settings

The Composer settings Dialog Box
The Composer settings Dialog Box

The Composer settings Dialog Box

### Word wrap at coloumn

Here you can set the value at which &knode; wraps the line. Besides you can deactivate the automatic word-wrapping completely.

It is recomended to use no more than 76 characters. Even when you are able to diable more. Many Usenet users will use a text-based newsreader which can not display more than 80 characters. It is difficult to read your articles in such a newsreader, if you increase this value. This reduces the probatility of your articles to be read at all.

### Append signature automatically

When you write a new article or a followup, your signature is appended automatically, if you have configured one in Settings Configure KNode...Identity.

### Introduction Phrase:

When you write a followup, &knode; inserts an introdutionary phrase befor the quoted orginal Text. You can put an aribrary text here. You can use variables, which &knode; extracts from the original article, ⪚ the name of the author or the date the article was written.

The following variable are available:

`%NAME`

  The name of the original author.

`%DATE`

  The date the original article was written.

`%EMAIL`

  The original authors email adress.

`%MSID`

  The Message-ID of the original article.

`%GROUP`

  The name of the newsgroup -the article comes from.

Keep this short, because this introductory line appears in every followup. A too long introducionary line can be as repelling as a too long signature.

An example introductory line

    On %DATE %NAME wrote in %MSID

Let us assume the original article was written by Konqui on Saturday the 17th of June at 17:42:32 - 0500. The article has the Message-ID <8igdg5.3vvijgt.3@lizard.physos.com>. &knode; will then insert the following introductionary line.

    On Sat, 17 Jun 2000 17:42:32 +0200 Konqui wrote in
    <8igdg5.3vvijgt.3@lizard.physos.com>:

### Rewrap quoted text automatically

When this is checked, the quoted text is wraped at the correct border value. So, every new line is in the correct quoting level.

### Include the authors signature

When this is activated, not only the text of the original message, but also the signature of the author is quoted in a reply.

Quoting a signature is unnecessary and is often considered impolite.

### Put the cursor below the introduction phrase

Normally the cursor will appear below the whole message when answering. With this option turned on the cursor appears below the introduction phrase.

This is especially helpful, when you quote an article and write between the quoted lines from top to bottom.

### Define external editor

You can define an external editor here, wich is opened by selecting Tools Start external editor in the Composer window.

When Start external editor auotmatically is checked, the external editor is opened directly.

Notice the `%f` after the name of the editor. This is a variable for the filename of the article you want to edit. Do not delete this. You will get an error message when opening the external editor.

When you have problems with starting your external Editor, the reason may be the editor starting in "the background". This is called forking. &knode; only notices the process started, is finished and thinks you have quit the editor. The editor gvim is an example for this. You can disable the forking of gvim with the commandline switch `-f`. It is recommended to refer to the documentation of the used editor for this.

When you want to use gvim in Specify Editor use the following input:

`gvim -f %f`

### Start external Editor automatically

If this option is active the external editor will be used for editing articles.

## Spelling

Here you can configure the behaviour of the spell checker.

### Create root/affix not in dictionary

If this is checked a known word-root with an unknown affix will be automatically accepted as a new word.

### Consider run-together words as spelling errors

Here you can toggle if two known words that run together and are unknown if they run together should be treaten as an error or not.

### Dictionary

Here you chose the dictionary the spell-checker should use.

### Encoding

Here you can tell &knode; which encoding should be used for spell checking. For English texts this should normally be US-ASCII.

### Client

Here you can switch between the spell-checkers. You can use International Ispell or Aspell.

## Signing and verifying

Here you can configure &knode; for signing articles with GnuPG or PGP. Your GnuPG/PGP ID will be built automatically from your configured name and email address. It is identically with the from-line in the header of the article.

### Encryption tool

Here you can chose your encryption tool.

### Keep passphrase in memory

If this option is active you only need to type the passphrase for your private key once. &knode; remembers your passphrase until you close &knode; again.

### Show ciphered/signed text after composing

If this option is activated, &knode; shows the signed message in an extra window for confirmation before changing it in the editor.

### Always show the encryption keys for approval

Well, just ignore this option. You can't encrypt or decrypt an article in &knode; because it doesn't make any sense to use encryption in the usenet. This option is shown because &kmail; and &knode; use the same program for PGP.

### Check signatures automatically

If this is marked, the PGP signature of the article is automatically checked when showing the article. If there's no mark, you can check the signature for correctness manually with the menu View Verify PGP-Signature.

## The article cleanup settings.

The dialog below, shows the settings for the article cleanup. These settings are used to keep the amount of articles on your local harddisk in a reasonable value. &knode; administrates the articles in memory, so there can be some decrease in speed, if you have to many articles lying around. Most of the time it makes no sense to keep articles for a very long time. Services like Google and Altavista make archiving unnecessary.

&knode; isn't an offline reader, so all of the configuration refers to the headers which are managed by &knode;! If you are running a local news server such as leafnode you should refer to it's documentation to handle expiring the articles on the server — &knode; cannot do this for you.

The cleanup settings
The cleanup settings

The cleanup settings

### Expire old articles automatically

When this option is active, all subcribed groups are checked for old articles in the time interval set here. The old articles are deleted at this time.

You can force this check by selecting Group Expire group

### Purge groups every

Here you can configure how often subscribed groups should be checked for old articles and how often those articles should be deleted. This option only has effects when the mark in front of Expire old articles automatically is set.

### Keep read articles

Read articles are deleted by the next cleanup, if they are older than this value. &knode; uses the make date for this.

### Keep unread articles

Unread articles are deleted by the next cleanup, if they are older than this value. &knode; uses the make date for this.

### Remove articles that aren't available on the server

It may happen that you'll see a header in &knode; but the article isn't available on the server. If this option is set, those articles will automatically deleted in &knode;.

### Preserve threads

This selection forces a thread only to be deleted, if all articles contained, fulfill the delete conditions. This means, if the last article in the thread would be deleted, all articles of the thread will be deleted.

This prevents old articles in a long thread to vanish, before the dicussion is ended.

&knode; can not predict, if there is a reply, after the set conditions are fulfilled. You have to find your own settings for this. Some newgroups have days between replys, others only hours. Use your own judgement.

### Compact folders automatically

This option refers to the memory behavior of &knode;. If an article in a folder is deleted, it only will be marked as deleted but still uses the memory of your harddisk. With this option you can tell &knode; to delete the articles really and free the hard disk space regularly.

You can force this check by selecting Folder Compact folder or for all folders together with Folder Compact all folder.

### Purge folders every

Here you can configure how often the folder is checked for deleted articles. This only takes effect if the option Compact folders automatically is set.