[solved] how to get rmail to read email.

[vose]

I've got messages sitting in the directory /var/spool/exim/input
How do I get emacs to show them to me? When I type M-x rmail I get "0 new messages read".
I have already set the environment variable
MAIL=/var/spool/exim/input
I've also had a look at rmail.el which makes no sense to me because it makes reference to a "file" when my mail is NOT in a file, it is comprised of a collection of files -- one per message -- within the directory /var/spool/exim/input.
I've also tried to set the variable rmail-spool-directory, but emacs complains that
value `/var/spool/exim/input' does not match type of rmail-spool-directory.
I've emerged both rmail and emacs.
In the past (as far as I can remember) things automagically worked, but, with a new install, not any more...

[vose]

I've tried
MAIL=maildir://var/spool/exim/input/
which seems to be progress; now M-x rmail complains that Emacs movemail does not support maildir protocol
I also did
emerge -vp mailutils
and added
(setq rmail-movemail-program "/usr/bin/movemail")
to .emacs because that was the new version provided by the emerge
(the old versions I found were /usr/lib64/xemacs-21.4.22/x86_64-unknown-linux/movemail
and /usr/libexec/emacs/24.3/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu/movemail, but the setq did not work with them either).
Still no go.

Evidently how to turn rmail into a useful tool for reading mail (it used to work before my reinstall)
has now become a well guarded secret

Hope someone can help me with this...

[vose]

I'm moving on... have other fish to fry.