Making Gnus behave like other mail readers

- http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GnusTutorial

Making Gnus behave like other mail readers

FIXME: This section is very incomplete! I hope that somebody will provide us with settings that might be desirable.

Don't hide messages that have been read

Gnus operates in a newsreaderly fashion and thinks that most of the time you don’t want to read messages twice. So it hides from you the messages that you have read already. It does not, however, delete these messages! They are still on disk.
If you want to see old messages, use C-u <RET> to enter a group, or type C-u M-g from within the group. If you always want to see old messages for a specific group, hit G c (not g c) on it and frob the display parameter. If you want to see old messages for several groups, you can also set the parameter on a topic. If you want to do it by group name, see the variable gnus-parameters (in recent Gnusae only).
But I advise against this, because showing a lot of messages in the summary buffer is quite slow in Gnus, and you can tell Gnus to show you the interesting ones. For example, I use

     (setq gnus-fetch-old-headers t)

and this means that when a new followup arrives in a thread, I see the previous messages from that thread, too. Of course, from time to time, I want to look at old messages and use C-u <RET> or C-u M-g, as described above.