I managed to get gnus working, with acceptable speed.  I first did the imap sync, then, after getting all that working, managed to find other settings that made it work much faster.

(Basically, it's only slow on gmail -- it works fine with my office mail)

I did have to hack starttls.el though.  My office uses imap over ssl, not imap with starttls to start ssl, so gnutls-cli has to be called w/o the -s flag.

Anyway, I really don't like gnus much, so, I may give WL a try.

I am still setting up orgmode the way I like it .. . finally settling down to a routine thanks to all the useful links here.  Once I'm comfortable, then I'll start hacking on things.  I love the idea of remember, but, I need to get it working for external links anyway, so, there will be a lot of work to be done, once I'm up and running.  (things to get links from mac aps other than safari and Mail.app, I mean.  I use firefox, postbox (for now), etc)

I will give WL a try.  If only to see if I like it.  I don't think it ships by default, and I try to keep my emacs setup synched, and I'm not sure I want to carry around another heavy application in my .emacs.d :)  Gnus, as much as I don't like the interface, is at least included in all of my emacsen :)

-Dave