I'm quite impressed by the horde of responses this has garnered in little more than 15 hours, I thank everyone for their help. I have not yet tried nupas, but have gotten a reasonable solution working.
It appeared that while I was tweaking my setup (and rebooting often, causing upas to re-download thousands of messages over and over again) gmail decided I was a bot and gave me a SECTOR 4 LOCKDOWN, a temporary status when an account is being used too much that prevents access. With a little patience I rebooted my machine in the morning and went to class. After class I came home to a brilliant display of faces and acme-mail goodness. So my solution, albeit temporary, causes long boot times (and prevents me from having to reboot a ton (at least without first removing the box from the interblarg). But, given that this machine is intended to stay up for extended periods of time, I don't forsee that as an issue. Maybe once I've really gotten a stronger feel for things I'll dedicate a machine and just import /mail to my terminal. Using pop3 access would eliminate this issue altogether, but I'm sure all you plan9gmailers out there already know that gmail is a little wonky with upas, due to gmail's nonconformity in forcing pop clients into thinking that they are removing the server-side copy of the mail. Oh well, I'll spend some more time tweaking and breaking. That's the fun of it all. Also, Ruda, you can get gmail's web interface working with abaco, there's a patch you have to apply to webfs to get the cookies working correctly. For more information peruse the plan9 wiki, someone threw up a nice gmail page.
