Mail application won't let me use it until it has imported all my gmail messages?

I have a Macbook pro. I had to do a system restore on my computer. For some reason the Mail application is making me set up my mail all over again. I use gmail. When I open the Mail application, a window comes up that says:

"Mail needs to import your messages. This might take a few minutes. You won't be able to use Mail until the import is finished"

So I hit import. A few minutes? Try 500 hours! That's what the Mail application says when I hit import. There are only two options that it gives me: there is a button to import the messages and a button to cancel and that's it. What if I don't want to import all those messages? The problem is, it says I have 9,000 messages to import from gmail according to the Mail application.That couldn't be right could it? 500 hours is just ridiculously long, there's no way i could download all that. It would take FOREVER. Is there any way to access my mail without having to import all the messages? How come all my other computer settings/apps stayed the same except for the Mail application when I did the system restore?

What's happening is that you have never removed your old mail from the GMail server. The GMail server will just keep piling up those emails forever unless you either select the option in Mail to remove them from the server after they're downloaded, or, you go to the server and delete them yourself.

The only mail automatically deleted by GMail is spam and that's after a certain amount of time. I check my stack of mail every month on the GMail server and remove what I don't want to keep.

I couldn't quite figure out how to delete messages. It'll only let me do it 50 at a time? I tried to change the settings so that it'll automatically delete the messages but I got confused because it wanted me to enter a date or something. Sorry I am totally clueless when it comes to computers

Yeah, unfortunately Google's directions and instructions can be somewhat confusing. What you can try is choose to view as many of your stored messages at one time as you can. I have mine set to show 100 messages at a time. Place an "X" in the "select" box and 100 messages will be flagged at a time. Then select the garbage pail and those messages will be sent to the trash.

You have to do the same thing 100 messages at a time. It can get tedious if you have a large number of email messages to go through. That's why it's important to keep up with it. For now you'll just have to bite the bullet and go through them all until they're removed otherwise they will download to Mail.

You probably don't want to delete your messages by date in case there are some that you wish to save.

The import of the messages stopped. It'll get to a certain point, then it stops loading them. It's been stuck on 693 out of 9429 messages downloaded now for 4 hours. I try to cancel and do it again and It still then stops loading?

I use imap and it doesn't take much time to download my 5+ gigs of email using imap. I regularly delete messages I don't need as they come in. But I use Thunderbird for my email client and maybe Mail is having issues with so many messages to download? Perhaps look into Mozilla Thunderbird. It has may features that work well with Gmail.