Gnus5, procmail, and reading mail lists.

[mdb@cdc.noaa.gov (Mark Borges)]

I'd like to take a stab at using Gnus5 to read mailing list mail as a
newsgroup. I've read through the info pages, but before I take the
plunge (and possibly lose some of this valuable list mail) I thought
I'd ask this list if the below is correct, and/or if there are any
pitfalls in what I'm planning. I checked the FAQ, and didn't see
specific answers (maybe these Q's aren't F enough).

I use procmail.

Procmail splits my incoming mail box into the mailing list boxes in my
home directory, i.e., it takes /var/mail/me and extracts mail from the
two lists foo and bar into:

	$HOME/mail/spool/foo
	$HOME/mail/spool/bar

Currently, I use VM and movemail to read these, but the scoring
capability of Gnus5 is begging me to try it instead.

So, how do Gnus / procmail exist, esp. with regard to lockfiles?

My reading of the info pages suggests I do the following:

	(setq nnmail-use-procmail t); use it
	(setq nnmail-spool-file "procmail") ; or should that be a variable?
	(setq nnmail-split-methods nil)) ; avoid unpleasant side effects
	(setq nnmail-procmail-directory (expand-file-name ~/mail/spool))
	(setq nnmail-procmail-suffix nil) ; just use the group name? I
 	                                    want the group to be foo
 	                                    and the spool file to be
 	                                    foo, as above.

Also, there was some discussion of why this:

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If you use `procmail' to split things directory into an nnmh directory
(which you shouldn't do), you should set `nnmail-keep-last-article' to
non-`nil' to prevent Gnus from ever expiring the final article in a
mail newsgroup. This is quite, quite important.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

was important, but I lost it. Anyway, I'm planning on using nnml as the
backend to get the NOV databases (unless procmail can do it more
efficiently). Is it just as important for nnml as nnmh?

Finally, should I restrict myself to the Gnus5 expiry process, or can
I just run a simple cron job each weekend to remove old mail? (I
suspect that might confuse Gnus5 after a while, though.)

Thanks for any tips (or pointers to procmail recipes).

  -mb-