7.9.14 Agent Caveats

The Gnus Agent doesn’t seem to work like most other offline newsreaders. Here are some common questions that some imaginary people may ask:

If I read an article while plugged, do they get entered into the Agent?

Yes, because of the default value of gnus-agent-eagerly-store-articles. An alternative is to add gnus-agent-fetch-selected-article to gnus-select-article-hook.

If I read an article while plugged, and the article already exists in

the Agent, will it get downloaded once more?

No, unless gnus-agent-cache is nil.

In short, when Gnus is unplugged, it only looks into the locally stored articles; when it’s plugged, it talks to your ISP and may also use the locally stored articles.