Errors installing a clean gnus setup

[Richard Riley <rileyrg@googlemail.com>]

I decided to bin my .newsrc.eld as it (a) huge and (b) suspect in some
funny article handling (c) editing it with emacs was impossible since
the article count alist thingy is a single line and takes about 3-6
seconds to cursor down a visual line.  At the same time I removed all
custom settings for things like archive methods, archive backend etc
ditto for drafts.

My init settings for file locations are pretty much the following

 (setq gnus-init-file nil
        gnus-home-directory "~/.emacs.d/"
        mail-default-directory "~/.emacs.d/"
        message-directory "~/.emacs.d/Mail/"
        )
 
which I borrowed from Antoine.

I removed all old draft, archive and Mail directories assuming gnus
would create them as defaults.

Upon starting Gnus afresh I got this:-

1) Drafts

Warning: Opening nndraft server...failed: No such file or directory: ~/.emacs.d/drafts/; Denied server nndraft

So it seems to fail to create the draft directory itself. I then looked into my
server list and get this:-

 
,----
|    {nndraft:} (denied)
`----

Hmm. I then looked into my .emacs.d and Gnus *had* created
~/.emacs.d/drafts. But *after* issuing the failure messages and denying
access it seems. I would think this a bug?

2) Archive

,----
|    {nnfolder:archive} (error)
`----

There is no indication of why the archive failed even if I turn up
gnus-verbose.

This is using the default gnus-message-archive-group and default
gnus-message-archive-method.
  
This was the case with HEAD and n0-15.

Can I debug this further somehow?