reading mail with Gnus

[Allan Poindexter <allan@royal-oak.csc.ti.com>]

I have been trying to set up Gnus as a mail reader with mixed success.
Currently I read mail with RMAIL.  I split my messages with procmail into a
variety of inboxes in "~allan/mail/.inboxes".  These correspond to BABYL files
in "~allan/mail" with the same name (e.g. the RMAIL file "~allan/mail/gnus"
has an inbox set up at "~allan/mail/.inboxes/gnus").  The one exception is
"~allan/RMAIL" whose is left in the traditional location but has an inbox at
"~allan/mail/.inboxes/inbox".  I have tried to use the nnbabyl backend to read
this but can't get it to see new mail or any other files.  Here is one of the
server definitions I tried:

(nnbabyl "mymail"
	 (nnmail-spool-file nil)
	 (nnmail-use-procmail t)
	 (nnmail-procmail-directory "~allan/mail/.inboxes")
	 (nnmail-procmail-suffix ".nnbabyl")
	 (nnbabyl-mbox-file "~allan/mail/nnbabyl/NNBABYL")
	 (nnbabyl-active-file "~allan/mail/nnbabyl/active")
	 (nnbabyl-get-new-mail t))

I set up a group like this:

("nnbabyl:mymail.misc" 3 nil nil "mymail" nil)

But no messages are found when I try to get new news.  I have tried lots of
different settings but none seems to do what I want which is to form a new
group for each of the inbox files in the .inboxes directory.  Most don't even
get the normal mail much less the other groups.  What am I doing wrong?

I am willing to change most things about mail setup to get the Gnus interface
for my mail.  One thing I would like to keep however is the procmail
processing.  I would also *like* to be able to read the resulting files in
RMAIL(i.e. babyl format) but this is not absolutely essential.  I have
considered moving to the mh backend too and will gladly listen to any
arguments why I should.  I don't know too much about the strengths and
weaknesses of each the backends I'm afraid.

Thanks in advance, dex 

P.S. To deal with one obvious objection:  I originally had
nnmail-procmail-suffix set to "".  When I changed it to ".nnbabyl" I made
copies of the appropriate inboxes at <inbox>.nnbabyl for testing purposes so
that is not the problem.