New user: recent experience, doubts and questions

Greetings,

I'm a relatively new MH-E user, and equally important a new MH user. I
have for years dabbled with MH: a copy of "MH & xmh: Email for Users &
Programmers" came into my possession more than 10 years ago and after
reading it I was more or less convinced of the advantages of it.

Having said that, different reasons have kept me from "migrating": for
personal use I have now a huge amount of email in gmail, so having a
local copy (and giving up multiple device access) is something that I
have yet to do (and also why I'm posting to mh-e-user using Gnus, since
I'm using gmane). For work usage this is not so much a concern, and this
is the area where I am attempting to "convert", so I gathered some
general questions/doubts in the last few days that I would like to
share, maybe they make little sense or maybe I can help in some of them
(opening requests if needed, testing, making simple changes, etc).

I have read the manual, the mailing list, the MH book, but I'm bound to
have missed something, it is *a lot* of information and only by using it
will I understand the finer details.

I have a Debian sid system with:

-*-
MH-E 8.3.1

MH-E compilation details:
 Byte compiled:		yes
 Gnus (compile-time):	Gnus v5.13
 Gnus (run-time):	Gnus v5.13