Comment 3 for bug 1332908

Eli, "IMAP folders" were designed so that they represent a mirror of what is on the server. So, if there 23K messages on the server, all of them would have to be present in the IMAP folder too. Doing anything else would be too complicated. Here are a couple of ideas for you:

- You should have been using headers-only messages for IMAP (also called "external messages"). They are described in the "Starting up" section of the manual. If you haven't been using them, please do.

- You can cut down the size of the INBOX on the server by archiving messages. Go to the first message in the folder and do
        ESC-1000 M-x vm-imap-save-message-to-imap-folder RET <folder-name> RET
and VM will ask gmail to archive 1000 messages. You should do this in little bits at a time, because gmail is really slow in doing archiving. Don't know why.

I will think of ways to reduce the amount of space taken up by messages. But all those things will still need you to control the size of the INBOX because we will never be able to match the resources of the gmail servers.