>> I'm having it almost constantly. I just arrived to work, tried to
>> check for new mail, and I only got a nice clock instead of the mouse
>> pointer, and that's it. So I don't know what could this be. If I
>> restart emacs checking for new mail will be almost instantaneous.
>
>  You may try other email account to see if this problem is persistent.
>  Otherwise , you have to find out where Emacs/GNUS is blocked  ,by some
> external tools ,such as GDB or elisp debugger ....Sorry, not able to help
> you here :)

No probs. I'm also wondering whether emacs is an appropriate tool for
reading/writing emails. But since I don't want to manipulate text
otherwise, I'll try to make this work.