recurrence of old problem with inordinate delays fetching mail

[Jack <ostroffjh users sourceforge net>]

Hello all,

I've just returned from a three weeks vacation.  While away, I only used 
imap for all email access.  I'm now trying to POP3 download all my 
email.  All mail servers have gone fine except for gmail.  There are a 
bit over 200 messages, and after somewhere around half of them were 
downloaded, it started taking over twenty seconds for each additional 
message.  Based on watching top and on previous experience, I believe 
the problem is that Balsa applies inbox filters after each new message 
is downloaded, and this calls html2text on every message in the mailbox, 
but now I have over 150 messages in my mbox inbox.  In the short term, 
can anyone suggest a way to find which one is likely causing problems?  
In the long run, would it make sense not to apply filters to a mailbox 
until all pending actions are done - specifically fetching a whole bunch 
of POP3 messages?

I've also tried deleting a few messages at a time from the INBOX, but it 
just hung, presumably having problems rewriting the mbox file.  I might 
try deleting all the remaining new messages from the INBOX and then 
copying one at a time from the IMAP inbox.

I have a vague recollection that in the past, the problem was caused by 
some HTML only message with invalid HTML that all browsers and other 
email clients (TBird) handle fine.

(Hopefully I'll be able to find any answers to this by using IMAP for 
the interim.)

Thanks for any suggestions.

Jack