how to remove groups entirely from .newsrc.eld file?

[Gernot Hassenpflug <gh@nospam.com>]

Hello,

I have been using gnus to read old mail, using G D. I then copied
articles en masse to nnml groups, which are created by gnus if they do
not already exist. However, if I want to now kill one of these nnml
groups, and I use either S k or Ctrl-K, the group still remains
somewhere in my startup news files. I have some parsing error in one
of these nnml groups, perhaps due to Japanese character sets, and I
copied articles to other groups, and deleted this particular nnml
group. It still gets read on startup though....

Do I have to edit the .newsrc.eld file by hand to get rid of it?

On a related note, anything done with G D appears in the .newsrc.eld
file, as expected, but not anywhere in my .gnus.el. Similarly, if I
copy articles from an existing mail group into a new one, this new one
is created, but does not exist in my .gnus.el. This is inconvenient
for me, since I do not want my mail groups destroyed if something
happens to .newsrc.eld. That file is also not so easy to understand at
a glance. 

Is there a recommended method for keeping mail safely organized (easy
to overview in the .gnus.el file, for example, not so easy if you
don't know where on disk(s) your groups were located if you have to
try and look for them again), and can I move stuff that is created
with G D into my .gnus.el file?

Thanks, and best regards,
     Gernot Hassenpflug
-- 
G Hassenpflug RASC, Kyoto University