GNU-related newsgroups

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Relevant hierarchies in 2025

• The historical gnu.* hierarchy is essentially inactive, but two groups (gnu.emacs.gnus and gnu-emacs.help) did show some activity between September 2024 and September 2025. These groups are not synchronized with mailing lists anymore. It is not clear when they started living their own life.
• Gmane gateways and archives many of the gnu.org mailing lists, including those that correspond to the gnu.* hierarchy. The gateway is bidirectional, meaning that what is posted on the mailing list propagates to the corresponding newsgroup and vice-versa.
• Gwene gateways RSS feeds. Newsgroups in the gwene.org.gnu.* subtree (among others) correspond to GNU Planet blogs, Savannah newsfeeds, Git commits, etc., via their RSS feeds.

How mailing lists and Gmane newsgroups relate to gnUsenet

The following table shows which mailing list and Gmane newsgroup correspond to each of the gnUsenet groups that were still active in 2007. Gmane gateways many more GNU mailing lists nowadays.

How to access the newsgroups

One of the best sources of information on the availability of newsgroups is uzantoreto.com. A search for gnu. or specific GNU packages will return the relevant groups, servers that carry them, dates of first and last messages on each server, etc. Note that a recent date for the last message doesn't necessarily mean that the newsgroup was still active on that date. It could be overtaken by spam.

• The gmane.* and gwene.* newsgroups are only available from news.gmane.io and news.gwene.org, interchangeably. Gmane archives the mailing lists since 2002 instead of deleting messages after some time as do most other Usenet providers.
• Some of the gnu.* newsgroups can still be found on the main news servers and a few small ones. (Check with your ISP, it may still maintain an NNTP server.) However, the retention period of messages on gratis servers ranges from a few months to at most three years. So they can't be used to retrieve old messages from inactive groups.
• Many of these old messages (between 1988 and 2013) are in the Usenet Historical Collection at archive.org, and the Usenet Archives have a few more (between 1988 and 2010).

Some archeological findings

The Usenet Archives keep posts about the various flavors of Emacs dating back to 1982, including a thread about the first public release of GNU Emacs on March 20th, 1985 (version 13).

Mailing lists have been gatewayed to newsgroups since the beginning of the GNU project, but the synchronization was not always perfect. By comparing what's archived in the Usenet Historical Collection with the Gmane or mailing list archives, it appears that gnUsenet was largely disconnected from the mailing lists between 2003 and 2006, as mentioned by the 2007 revision of this page. Besides, some major mailing lists and newsgroups were flooded with spam during that period. Gatewaying returned to normal around 2006-2007, and the spam filters became much more efficient.

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gnUsenet gnu.* hierarchy

Introduction to gnu.*

The gnu.* Usenet (or gnUsenet) hierarchy is a collection of newsgroups about the GNU Project. Most of the newsgroups correspond to GNU mailing lists and just provide an alternate way for people to read and post to those mailing lists if they prefer a USENET interface to a mail interface. There are also a small number of newsgroups that do not have corresponding mailing lists.

The gnu.* newsgroups are carried by most large and many small news servers, but the hierarchy went unmaintained for a very long time. As of May 2007, there is an effort underway to actively maintain the hierarchy, with the newsgroups and mailing lists again linked to each other using the gatewaying abilities of GNU Mailman.

This page lists the current information on how to carry and maintain the gnu.* newsgroups. This information has changed as of 2007, so if you are a news administrator, you may need to update your server configuration. If you are interested in reading the gnu.* newsgroups and your local server does not carry the current newsgroup list, please refer your local news administrator to this page.

List of gnu.* newsgroups

Here is the list of newsgroups in the gnu.* hierarchy. The format of this file is in USENET checkgroups format, suitable for processing with a program such as INN's docheckgroups program to add those newsgroups to a news server.

Carrying gnu.*

To automatically create new gnu.* newsgroups and remove defunct ones, please honor all control messages in gnu.* from usenet@gnu.org that are signed by the corresponding GPG public key (see below). The INN control.ctl entry is:

## GNU (Free Software Foundation)
# Contact: usenet@gnu.org
# URL: http://www.gnu.org/usenet/usenet.html
# Key URL: http://www.gnu.org/usenet/usenet-gpg-key.txt
# Key Fingerprint = C006 C321 A9A6 635D 0F6D AEB2 7358 FE1D F904 5B7D
checkgroups:usenet@gnu.org:gnu.*:verify-usenet@gnu.org
newgroup:usenet@gnu.org:gnu.*:verify-usenet@gnu.org
rmgroup:usenet@gnu.org:gnu.*:verify-usenet@gnu.org

A very long time ago, control messages used to be sent from gnu@prep.ai.mit.edu or from news@prep.ai.mit.edu; these addresses are now entirely obsolete.

All control messages in the gnu.* hierarchy are signed with a GPG signature using the GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG). News servers should have a mechanism that allows them to verify those signatures; see your news server documentation.

Download the gnu.* PGP public key.