Personal mail lists with gnus plus bbdb

[Harry Putnam]

I'm getting a little confused about how to create a mailling list
using gnus and bbdb.

The directions talk as if `mail-abbrevs.el' is required to make it
work.  But I see that code is apparently not part of gnus, emacs  or
bbdb distributions.  So wondering if this info in the manual is out of
date or something.

At least mail-abbrevs.el it is not on my system with gnus from cvs,
emacs-23 and most recent bbdb installed.

It appears it might be part of xemacs distro... but not sure about
that since I don't use xemacs

At any rate, just adding an aliase to a few bbdb entries, saving bbdb,
then putting the alias in the To: field seems to not have the desired
effect, and doesn't expand with M-tab (bbdb-complete-name as is described 
in the bbdb manual

Googling `mail-abbrevs.el... isn't even turning up somewhere to
download it.

Can any one describe how they use bbdb with gnus to create mailling lists?