In the field Name you enter your name, e.g. 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.

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

The field Email shows up when someone wants to reply to you by e-mail. The e-mail 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 Emailis mandatory.

Reply-to Address offers you the possibility to enter a different address than your sender e-mail address. If someone replies to you by e-mail, 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.

The input field Organization is optional and does not have to be filled out. You can enter e.g. 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.

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

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 e.g. 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.

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

You can later adapt the identity individually for each of the subscribed groups via the Preferences dialog, e.g. 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, e.g. 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.

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

The next field is labelled Server. Unlike the field Name, it is not unimportant 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

By now you have completed the setup of your news account. 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.

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.

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.

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

The name of your mailserver is not arbitrary. Your ISP, should provide you the informations, which mailserver 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

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 nad tells you to do so. We do not change this for the example.

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

When KNode tries to connect to the mailserver, it waits this long for a reply by the the server. Is this time execceded, you get a error message.

In the next step we look at the general settings for reading news.

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.

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!

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.

This setting lets discussion be displayed completely (over multiple answer levels, that is). If this setting isn't checked, only the immediate answers to the current article are displayed.

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

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.

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.

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 disable, alternative contents are not displayed.

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.

The selection box Header line 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.

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 sender. 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.

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

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, i.e. "John Doe <johndoe@doubleguns.com>" appears in a italic font.

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

Example 2.1. Show the newsreader used for a post in the article window

This pictures shows the dialog with the header line X-Newsreader.

The dialog Header Display

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 line and select the entry X-Newsreader from the list.

In the field Shown 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.

If this setting is activated, KNode enlarges the folder view over the whole heigth of the main window. That way, the width of the article window is restricted to the area below the article view.

If this setting is deactivated, the article window can use the whole width of the main window.

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 left mouse button 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 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 left mouse button 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.

Here you can choose the charset used for encoding your articles. Normally this is iso 8859-1 in Western Europe and 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 (i.e. eastern-european or asian) you can set the needed charset here.

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

When you choose 7-bit encoding, special characters are not correctly send. 7-bit is kind of restricted to the us-ascii charset.

When you choose 8-bit encoding, most special characters are transfered.

When you choose quoted-printable, 8-bit charcters are send as encoded 7-bit charcaters.

This setting allows 8-bit characters in the header, if checked, i.e. in the subject. This is explicitly not allowed by the standard.

This setting is made for a special case, because in scandinavian newsgroups, standard encoded 8-bit characters in the headers are reasonably common.

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

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

Here you can enter X-Headers, wich are not provided by KNode For example: X-No-Archive: yes. This should prevent your articles to be archived by i.e. dejanews.

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.

When this option is checked, KNode does not include the according 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.

Here you can set the value at which KNode wraps the line.

When you write a new article, or a folloeup, your signature is appended automatically, if you have configured one in Settings->Preferences+ Identity.

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, i.e. the name of the author or the date the article was written.

The following variable are available:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This selection forces a thread, only to be deleted, if all articles contained, fulfill the delete conditions.

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

After the time, set here, KNode removes all deleted or moved articles finally from the folders.