Limit number of fetched message headers WITHOUT using header cache/body cache?

[Jaime T]

After installing and setting up mutt to connect to my gmail account
via imap, mutt downloads all message headers, thus:

Fetching message headers... 41821/78259 (53%)

I already know that the "standard" way of *not* repeatedly downloading
all these message headers is to cache them on the client. Is there a
way to limit how many message headers mutt fetches? Ideally, I would
like to fetch only the most recent 30 or so message headers, and I do
*not* want to use "header caching" or "body caching".

Many thanks.