You can get around this issue completely without archiving/messing up your gmail inbox. Sign up for Nokia messenging. I thought it was a separate email account but its not - its a Nokia push service. Just sign up online, then go into the nokia email application in the N900 and type in your details. You can get it to download the last 3days or 30 days of emails - and lovely push gmail. Its made my N900 snappier on the whole. (I had been using IMAP gmail before with 13,000 emails, hence a slow email app!)