fetch only a portion of an article? (nnimap mainly)

["Ted Zlatanov" <tzz@lifelogs.com>]

In Gnus, you call gnus-request-article to get an article.  What if you
know you only need the first N lines (or bytes)?  Can nnimap.el
support that?  I can change the gnus-request-article function to
accomodate such an option, and it will be passed to
nnimap-request-article.  I just don't know enough about the IMAP
protocol to implement it.

I need this specifically for nnimap interactions, but I'm sure it can
be implemented for other backends as well.  It's useful, for instance,
when summarizing something about the contents of the article, but you
don't want to fetch more than N lines of it.  I would use it to
summarize qmail bounce reports - right now, I have to fetch the whole
article just because I need to see what's in the first 10 lines.

Ted