Post to Newsgroup(s)
This is what you normally choose to post a message. Check which groups in the group window are highlighted before choosing this command - the highlighted groups will be entered as the ones you are going to post to. You will find this command in the "Article" menu after opening a group.

• when in the groups window you can search for (parts of) groupname(s).
• when in the articles window you can search for subjects and authors
• when in the article viewer you can search for text in this message
• when in a stored folder you can search for subjects, authors and text in message-bodies.

Find Again
Saves you a click by searching the last used term.

Delete Duplicates
When you transferred the same article more than one time to a folder and wish to clean up this is where to go. An excellent way when you drop in a group every now and then to leech articles with a special subject for later reference. No need to select by date manually - just transfer by estimation and compact the folder afterwards. Speaking of "compact", see here how to really compact your folder.

XPAT Search
XPAT is an NNTP-command and short for "Cross-Pattern-Search" (is it?) which performs a server-side search for articles by their headers. Just enter your desired Subject (e.g. *Maui*) to make the server only return articles which contain the word Maui in the Subject. This works as well with References, Keyword, From, Message-ID and Organisation. Don't forget the asterisks which function as wildcards. If you get an error message, your ISPs newsserver doesn't support XPAT.

Copy to Clipboard
If you awaited an "Copy/Paste from/to clipboard" command rather in the article-viewer don't be confused. There you'll find it with a right-click. The purpose of this command here is another one: it lets you copy your subscribed groups to another groups-window (from another server you have set up).

Paste from Clipboard
See Copy to Clipboard

 Subscribe
Subscribes the highlighted group(s). The symbol left from the groupname should turn to a green triangle.

 Unsubscribe
Unsubscribes the highlighted group(s). The symbol left from the groupname now should be a blue bullet.

Clear Keep
You can keep single articles even if you leave the group with a CatchUp (see "Group | Mark Selected As Keep"). Clear Keep deletes all keep notifications for the highlighted group(s).

Clear Read and Keep
In addition to the "Clear Keep" command (see there) all read messages in the highlighted group(s) are marked as unread which means that they will reappear next time you open the group.

Get Message Count
Checks for the number of messages for the currently marked group(s).

Get All Message Counts
Checks for the number of messages for all subscribed groups.

Get New Groups
Checks the server for new groups. If there are any new found they appear with a red bullet in the list of all available groups.

Get Entire Newsgroup List
Transfers the whole newsgroup list from the server.
Hint: To make sure your newsgroup list contains only actual available groups switch to the list of all available groups. Mark all unsubscribed groups and hit delete. After that, get the entire newsgroup list from the server.

 New Subscription Folder
You can organize your subscribed groups in folders. "New Subscription Folder" asks for a name and places that so-created folder in your groups-list. Drag-and-drop one group after the other onto that folder to create your desired structure.

 Reload Subscription Folders
This can undo changes to your subscription folders provided that you didn't close the server window or saved the newsrc manually. You can use it as a screen redraw-utility as described in Group | Hide Empty Groups. What this command actually does is reloading the subscription-folder-information that is stored in the Xnewsrc for the current server and doing a screen redraw afterwards.

 Hide Empty Groups
In the groups window all of your subscribed groups are listed. Hide the groups with no unread articles to get quick overview what you read so far. You can set this as default in "Special | Setup Xnews - Misc"
Hint: If you leave a group with CatchUp, the Unread count will be set to 0. To clean up your screen in the groups-window, press the shortcut you assigned to "Group | Reload Subscription Folders" which will redraw the window and therefore hide the empty groups.

Override Server
You can seperate the servers where you download headers and where the message bodies will be loaded from. This is applicable if you are downloading binaries and on the fastest server some parts are missing. Another use is when you read from a free but incomplete server and only want to fill the gaps from a server you pay for. Third use: You usually read from a complete and perfectly administrated server but there's another one (e.g. the one from your provider) which is really fast. So browse the first one and let Xnews show you the messages from the second one where they are availabe. You won't even notice from which server the messages come unless you take a look in the path-header.

Step by step: Browse a group on one server (the non-free / slow server), and mark all articles you want. Then you choose "Group | Override Server" and choose another server ( the free / fast one). That way it will attempt to download everything from the Override-server, but if the part isn't there it will download it from the default server.

Refresh Headers
Checks for new articles in the active group and displays them in the articles list.

Refresh Headers Special
Lets you define how much headers to (re-)load from a specific group. Just enter the number in the "Get"-field and press ok.
This works in both the articles list and the groups-list: Assumed you just subscribed to a group which shows 4000 unread articles. Unless you aren't on a T3-connection you may want to load just, say 500 articles. Hitting Ctrl-Enter opens that same dialog. Move both sliders to the far right and enter "500" in the "Get"-field. Then press ok to load the newest 500 articles.
You can tell Xnews to automatically pop up this dialog box (also aka XOVER-dialog) when the number of unread messages in the group you are opening exceeds a limit which you can set in Xnews.ini ([XOVER]-section) with "PromptThreshold" (default is 50000).

Purge Folder
Deletes all stored articles in a folder. This command is only visible when you are viewing a folder.

Compact Folder
When an article is removed from a folder, it's not actually deleted but only marked as deleted. Thus, the size of the file remains the same. "Compact Folder" physically deletes those articles.

 Storage Options
[From the manual:] "As I mentioned earlier, Xnews is an on-line newsreader. It does cache articles within a session so that when you re-read an article, it just reloads the article from the cache instead of getting it from the server again. When you close the window, the cache is purged by default.
Once in a while, though, when you quit in the middle of reading a busy group, you don't want to do a catchup since you're not done yet, but you don't want to have to retrieve a lot of headers next time. This is what the Storage feature is for. Storage is basically just a more permanent cache."

(Re)Thread articles
If you have not turned on threading by default or toggled threading to view the single articles here you can reorder the articles to threads. Hint: Another quick way to achieve this is to Right-click on the "T" next to the filter box at the bottom of the screen.

Selection
Highlights articles for further action. Choose between "Selecting All Articles" and "Inverting Selection"

Mark All / Selected As...

Read
Marks the articles as Read. This is useful when you want to keep the overview in a group. Just have a glance over the subjects and mark those as read you aren't interested in because they are too old or have topics you don't want to read. Afterwards choose "Filter | Show Unread Articles Only" to blind them out.

Unread
Marks the articles as Unread e.g. when you marked them as read by fault. Also nice when you read some articles and want to see them later in the context of the upcoming responses. If you know this subject will catch your eye marking them as Unread will do it. If you want to make sure you don't miss them you better mark them as "Keep" (see below) or watch the discussion by "Article | Add to score file - Watch entire thread"

Delete
Assignes a score of -9999 to that article which means even if you have storage on, you won't see this article again.

Undelete
Undeleting deletes the kill-score you assigned when choosing "Delete".

Keep
Keeping an article means preserving it between Xnews-sessions. The article gets the score you can set in "Setup | Misc" and is marked with a blue icon. Additionally, the article-number is displayed in the groups-list. The latter is handy when you want to remember the groups you posted to so that you can check for replies.

Unkeep
Deletes the "Keep"-assignment.

High Score
Assigns a score of 9999 to that article so that this article will get your attention when you open the group the next time. Like Delete/Undelete the HighScore/0Score options mostly make sense when you have storage turned on.

0 Score
Removes any assigned scores to the selected articles. Note that this command doesn't remove the score on kept articles.

Discard Headers (free memory)
[From changes.txt:] This will throw out selected/all headers and free up memory. Obviously, if you see articles you're interested in, you should save them into a queue or archive folder first. These commands work in conjunction with an option in the aforementioned XOVER dialog that lets you limit how many headers to retrieve at a time. The idea is: rather than trying to load 100K headers and watch your Windows die a thousand deaths, you load, say, 20K headers at a time, save stuff you're interested in, then load the next 20K headers. You can also opt to have Xnews automatically discard the headers for you so you don't have to do a discard command each time. Note: it will not discard anything with >0 score or anything you have marked kept or queued, so you can keep articles from getting discarded by marking them with a high score or simply queuing them.

Catch Up
Set all articles in the active or highlighted group(s) as if you read them and close the window. Catch Up works using the article number: it tells Xnews that you want to treat the articls [1 - highest-numbered article retrieved] as read. Since it's faster for Xnews to retrieve headers in block but fragmented, it's a good idea to do a CatchUp once after a while (or even close each group using CatchUp, like I do).
For details see the manual.

[Excerpt from the manual:] Traditionally, "catchup" in newsreaders means to update the read count to the last article seen. If you look at the newsrc, you'll see a bunch of numbers like
    1-50,55,65-80.
Each article is assigned a number by the server, and these numbers in the newsrc indicate which articles you have read. When you do a catchup, the program sets this to
    1-<highest-numbered article retrieved>
"Catchup" basically means "okay, I've seen all I care to. Don't show me these articles next time." Note that you may not have actually read all these articles; you just want to treat it as if you did.

Since it's faster for Xnews to retrieve headers in block but fragmented, it's a good idea to do a CatchUp once after a while (or even close each group using CatchUp, like I do).

In the articles window, there are 3 catchup options (all of which will close the window):

CatchUp
this does what's described above

CatchUp and Clear Keep
This does the above and removes any kept articles as well. Keeping articles is an Xnews feature described above.

CatchUp and Kill Xpost
this is equivalent to issuing a mark all as read command then closing window. Mark all as read is NOT the same as catchup since catchup only sets the read count (i.e., it sort of fakes it) whereas Mark all as read go through each article and mark it read, as if you have actually read it. This does 2 things: 1) Mark as read will perform crosspost killing in subscribed groups. That is, if the same article was crossposted to another group you subscribe to, then it'll be mark as read there too. and 2) If you have storage on, the next time you retrieve headers, the old articles will show up as read. This last option is slower than the first two. How much slower depends on the amount of crosspost and number of articles.

CatchUp and Purge
same as above but also deletes all headers and article bodies if you have storage on.