Why expiry of drafts?

[Adrian Lanz]

One of the many pleasant features of Gnus/Message is drafts
handling. Drafts are kept in a draft group, and as soon as the article
is finshed and sent the draft is deleted from the draft group.

For me Gnus does too much! Drafts are not only deleted from the draft
group at the moment of sending, but also get immediatly expired. Well,
as expiry and deletion is somehow the same in Gnus, let me be more
specific on what happens when I send the mail message: the draft gets
removed from the draft group (as expected) and re-appears in a - kind
of - expiry group. This I too much (not needed). "A kind of expiry"
means that Gnus respects some aspects of the expiry configuration (see
details below), but puts the drafts into a directory on the file
system, where it never finds the articles again. I guess, that this is
not an intended feature of Gnus, but rather a bug or the result of a
wrong configuration of Gnus by myself. Please help. How can I stop
Gnus to make expiry copies of drafts?

Let me explain the expiry thing by an example. What I do (and see in
the message buffer) is the following:

* I start editing the article and save (C-x C-s) it before coffe
  break

   Wrote /home/lanz/mail/gnus/drafts/drafts/5

* After the break I continue edting the article and finally press C-c
  C-c (I use feedmail and smtpmail)

   No record were added.
   Sending...
   Sending via mail...
   FQM: Message action (q, i, d, e, ?)? [queue]: 
   FQM: Immediate send...
   Mark set

* Here follows a correct Gcc: into my nnfolder mail backend (for
  incoming mail messages)

   Wrote /home/lanz/mail/gnus/mail/ab-private
   Sending...done

* Here follows the (unnecessary) expiry thing. Expiry resolves the
  expiry target "wsl-2004" from my nnmail-fancy-expiry-targets, but
  places the copy of the draft at a wrong place on my file system (see
  below for further details)

   Wrote /home/lanz/mail/gnus/wsl-2004/9

* Then the article is deleted from the drafts group

   Deleting article /home/lanz/mail/gnus/drafts/drafts/5 in drafts...

The funny thing is (besides that I do not see why a draft - in the
intermediate draft state - is expired at all!), that the expiry target
is correctly evaluated from my nnmail-fancy-expiry-targets variable
(in the example above it resolves to "wsl-2004"), but that the
destination "/home/lanz/mail/gnus" seems to be derived from some
"general value" of nnml-directory. Usually my mail messages are
expired to the nnml-directory "/home/lanz/mail/gnus/expired/" as
configured in variable gnus-secondary-select-methods. The relevant
parts of my configuration are:

  (setq gnus-home-directory "/home/lanz/mail/gnus/")
  (setq gnus-directory gnus-home-directory)
  (setq message-directory gnus-home-directory)
  (setq message-auto-save-directory (concat message-directory "drafts"))
  (setq gnus-secondary-select-methods
        '(
          (nnfolder "mail"
                    ...
                    (nnfolder-get-new-mail t)
                    (nnfolder-inhibit-expiry nil))
          (nnml "expired"
                (nnml-directory "/home/lanz/mail/gnus/expired/")
                ...
                (nnfolder-get-new-mail nil)
                (nnfolder-inhibit-expiry t))))
  (setq nnmail-expiry-wait-function
        (lambda (group)
          (cond ((string= group "spam.mail")
                 5)
                (t
                 30))))
  (setq gnus-total-expirable-newsgroups "nnfolder\\+mail:.*")

So if ever expiring of messages happens, it should be only in
"nnfolder\\+mail:.*" groups (definitively not in the "nndraft:drafts"
group), after 5 (spam) or 30 days (not immediately as it seems to be
the case for drafts) and into a subdirectory of
"/home/lanz/mail/gnus/expired/" (not "/home/lanz/mail/gnus/" as for
drafts).

Any hint is highly appreciated. I work under current CVS versions of
Gnus and Gnu Emacs. The described symptom, however, is not new.

Thanks, Adrian.