gnus trying to read news while I want only mail

[Luca Ferrari]

Hi,
I'm moving the first steps into gnus following this tutorial
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GnusTutorial, and I've created my
.gnus.el file with my mail information. I want to use gnus only for
reading mail, not newsgroup, so I've removed the select-methods
variables. However, when I start gnus it spins searching for news
servers. I then set such variables to nil, but an error "attempting to
use a nil select method" arises. So I tried to point them to localhost
fake news server, and this made a connection error to raise and asked
me to continue or not, so I was able to get into gnus at last.
Is there a way to instrument gnus for not reading news at all?

Thanks,
Luca