the laborious bootstrap process

[Darcy Brockbank <darcy@hasc.com>]

I'm in the process of moving from a graphical mail package, to 
GNUS for email... 

So, I'm struggling through the wide array of lisp variables and
attempting to get GNUS customized to fit my needs. I've been unable
to get some simple questions answered, so I'm going to bounce them
around here to see if I can't get some help :-).

I'd like to:

(1) Run a spellchecker before sending mail. Has anyone hooked ispell
    to GNUS?

(2) I'd like to have it poll my mail server for new mail every
    five minutes or so, rather than having me do this manually. I
    can't seem to find anything to set this behaviour.

(3) This is shameful of me, but I can't seem to find out how to 
    read a mail message which has been marked read, and is no longer
    shown, but has not been expired. Something like a "show all read
    articles".

(4) I've been playing with the 'gnus-read-active-file' variable, and
    the values t, nil, and some all have pretty much the same result.
    The active file from my news server is about 1M, and takes about
    10 minutes to get here. I'm only interested in reading one
    newsgroup, and don't ever want to hear about others. What's the
    proper way of dealing with this?

Sorry if these are FAQable or whatever. I'm drowning in information
and settings and need to establish a foothold.

- darcy
   
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