accessing gmail over imap, how I like it

[Joe Corneli]

I just want to connect to Gmail, and download any new messages.
I'd also like to see messages in the "Sent Mail" folder (but I
consider
this a frill for now, because I'm finding the previous item hard
enough to bring about).

As it is, when I run M-x gnus, I get a list of how many new
messages are in my inbox at present (6, it turns out).  But
then it takes a long time to run while

nnimap: Updating info for INBOX...

Then I get the prompt

How many articles from INBOX (default 2968):

If I hit RET, then I seem to get only (or mainly, there's one
!'ed item) the handful new articles -- but that part before where it
took a long time to run, that's annoying!  This should be
fast, right?