Gnus: always seeing old articles when entering an imap folder

[Ferran Jorba <Ferran.Jorba@uab.cat>]

Hi fellow Gnus users,

I'm trying to make Gnus my only imap client.  But I find some
inconveniences that I haven't found how to solve.  This message is about
the first of them.

As much as I try to avoid it, I'm always typing `/ o' in my imap folders
in Gnus.  Moreover, when I check for new messages in my inbox, my Gnus
talks to our imap server twice: one for `Esc g' and the other for `/ o'.
And as my inbox is quite big, I feel I overload the server, and
everything slows down.  On the contrary, checking for new mail on
Thunderbird without loosing old messages is just a click of a button.

I'd be happy if I can always see old articles when visiting any folder,
but I'll be satisfied if, at least, this could be accomplished with my
inbox.

As I'm lisp-impaired, I've tried all sorts of variations in my .gnus.el
file that I've found in my Gnus manual reading and Google searches:

 ;;(setq gnus-summary-insert-old-articles 't)
 ;;(gnus-summary-insert-old-articles)
 ;;(setq gnus-fetch-old-headers 5000)

But none of them seems to help.  Help would be much appreciated.

Thanks,

Ferran