please comment on my setup

[dave-mlist@bfnet.com]

I'm rewriting my .gnus setup and moving my email to a new server.  I
have complete control over the server, so I'm considering a whole new
workflow.

To make my gnus portable, I'm putting my .gnus file on a crypto fs on
a portable USB drive.  All downloaded mail also goes on the crypto
drive.  I'll carry around the drive, and whatever host I'm using emacs
on, I'll point emacs at the .gnus file to read mail.  I have three
classes of mail:

0.  all mail ported from the old system will get archived in an nnmail
    hierarchy on the crypto drive.  The archive will be read-only.

1.  all incoming personal mail gets downloaded from various POP
    servers to their respective Maildirs, which are on the portable
    crypto drive.  When I run gnus, nnmail-split-fancy will split and
    archive this mail on the drive.

2.  all incoming mailing list mail stays in IMAP on server.  When I
    run gnus, nnimap-split-fancy will split this mail on the server.
    The purpose of this is to reduce bandwidth and time during mail
    download.

My gnus groups buffer will show me all groups from these three
classes.

My main concern is, since I'm moving from having fetchmail always
running on a single host, downloading in the background, to gnus
synchronously doing the downloading whenever I run "M-x gnus", am I
going to be frustrated by the download times?  I'm especially worried
about IMAP splitting taking a long time. Is there any way to make it
asynchronous?

Dave