[ale] Which OS for PPP to ISP?

[Martin B. Brilliant]

Douglas Todd wrote:

> A good starting point for Diald is the exelent talk that
> David Snyder gave at one of the ALE meetings. He has notes
> on his home page, which can be reached at
> 
> www.mindspring.com/~dsnyder

and others wrote similar comments. Thanks to all who mentioned diald.
I have diald set up and working with pine (though I had to stretch
the delays in diald.conf to get make that happen).

HOWEVER - it's not doing what I wanted. I like pine because it has a 
menu interface and it integrates mail and news. But it doesn't let me 
read mail and news without keeping the phone connection up. The IMAP 
paradigm keeps the mail on the remote server, so I have to stay in 
touch with the ISP, and news works similarly. The PPP connection 
doesn't drop until right after I terminate pine.

That's not what happens in MS-Windows. Pegasus mail gets all the new
messages, drops the phone line while I read and compose, and then
grabs the phone line again when I actually send replies. Free Agent
for news grabs the phone line to get new article headers for selected
newsgroups, to get selected article bodies, or to send articles and
emails; otherwise it lets the phone line drop.

Is there an app for Linux that will let me read and compose email and
news without holding the PPP connection up?

                                                Marty
Martin B. Brilliant at home in Holmdel, NJ