If you are writing a message (mail or news) and suddenly remember that you have a steak in the oven (or some pesto in the food processor, you craaazy vegetarians), you’ll probably wish there was a method to save the message you are writing so that you can continue editing it some other day, and send it when you feel its finished.
Well, don’t worry about it. Whenever you start composing a message of some sort using the Gnus mail and post commands, the buffer you get will automatically associate to an article in a special draft group. If you save the buffer the normal way (C-x C-s, for instance), the article will be saved there. (Auto-save files also go to the draft group.)
The draft group is a special group (which is implemented as an
nndraft group, if you absolutely have to know) called
‘nndraft:drafts’. The variable nndraft-directory says where
nndraft is to store its files. What makes this group special is
that you can’t tick any articles in it or mark any articles as
read—all articles in the group are permanently unread.
If the group doesn’t exist, it will be created and you’ll be subscribed to it. The only way to make it disappear from the Group buffer is to unsubscribe it. The special properties of the draft group comes from a group property (see Group Parameters), and if lost the group behaves like any other group. This means the commands below will not be available. To restore the special properties of the group, the simplest way is to kill the group, using C-k, and restart Gnus. The group is automatically created again with the correct parameters. The content of the group is not lost.
When you want to continue editing the article, you simply enter the
draft group and push D e (gnus-draft-edit-message) to do
that. You will be placed in a buffer where you left off.
Rejected articles will also be put in this draft group (see Rejected Articles).
If you have lots of rejected messages you want to post (or mail) without
doing further editing, you can use the D s command
(gnus-draft-send-message). This command understands the
process/prefix convention (see Process/Prefix). The D S
command (gnus-draft-send-all-messages) will ship off all messages
in the buffer.
If you have some messages that you wish not to send, you can use the
D t (gnus-draft-toggle-sending) command to mark the message
as unsendable. This is a toggling command.
Finally, if you want to delete a draft, use the normal B DEL command (see Mail Group Commands).