a mysterious star on the Gnus firmament

[Emanuel Berg]

OK, this must be the silliest problem yet, that
I have been unable to solve!

Just now, I fell asleep for like ~1s but it was
enough for me to accidentally press some
buttons while in a Gnus Summary buffer.
What happened was, an asterisk (the `*' char)
appeared to the right of a single e-mail, at
the 2nd position left-to-right (or Emacs buffer
column 1, if you will).

Inspecting `gnus-summary-line-format', we see
that


    gnus-summary-line-format is a variable
    defined in `gnus.el'. Its value is
    "%*%U%3{%R%} %I%1{%f%} %5{%s%}


so it would seem the `*' is in the "%R spot"!
Further down, it says


    %R  "A" if this article has been replied to,
        " " otherwise (character)


Hm - first, what does that mean? I get it "A"
is "replied to" (A for "answered", perhaps),
and that " " (i.e. no visible char) means it
isn't answered I mean replied to. But what does
"(character)" mean?

Second, what does the `*' char mean, how did it
get there (except for me falling asleep), and
how do I remove it?

TIA

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573