What's a good setup for submitting patches to the list properly?

Sorry for once again.

I haven't been able to figure out a good setup for posting patches to the 
list correctly, perhaps someone could tell me where I'm going wrong.

Alpine is setup to access git @ tbfowler.name with the 'postpone' folder 
being the 'Drafts' folder on the remote mail host, and a local mbox folder 
~/mail/git

Locally I prepped the emails using:

git format-patch --cover-letter --full-index -n 
--in-reply-to=1249428804.2774.52.camel@GWPortableVCS --thread --signoff -6 
--stdout>>~/mail/git

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/124834

Thinking that the cover letter would be in reply to a previous thread, and 
that the rest would show as a reply to that.  After doing the 
format-patch, I went into Alpine's git folder selected the messages and 
saved them to the Drafts folder, then did 'compose' for each one, filling 
in the information I thought was needed.

At that point, the msg list looked flat, so I opened Evolution Mail and 
looked at them there, they cascaded properly, so I sent them.  Yet, now, 
looking on gmane each of the patch msgs is a top level post and the cover 
letter correctly posted as a reply to the previous thread.

What could I have done/checked before sending to make sure that these 
would have posted properly?

-- 
Thell