Re: What's NOV? Should gnus-nov-is-evil be set to t?

[Lowell Gilbert]

I *am* a native English speaker, and I thought that text was quite
good.  Here, however, is a slightly edited version that may be
slightly more clear.

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What's NOV?

    NOV stands for News OverView, which is a type of news server header
which provide datas containing the condensed header information of
articles.  The are produced by the server itself; in the `nntp' back
end Gnus uses the ones that the NNTP server makes, but Gnus makes them
by itself for some backends (in particular, `nnml').  The NOV data
consist of one or more text lines (*note Motion by Text Lines:
(elisp)Text Lines.) where each line has the header information of one
article.  The header information is a tab-separated series of the
header's contents including an article number, a subject, an author, a
date, a message-id, references, etc.

   Those data enable Gnus to generate summary lines quickly.  However, if
the server does not support NOV or you disable it purposely or for some
reason, Gnus will try to generate the header information by parsing each
article's headers one by one.  It will take time.  Therefore, it is not
usually a good idea to set `*-nov-is-evil' to a non-`nil' value unless
you know that the server makes wrong NOV data.