Background mail transfers

[Barry Samuels <bsamuels@datamansys.co.uk>]

I normally work within a window manager environment (mostly KDE) when
using Debian Potato and have used KMail to download mail directly from my
ISP pop3 accounts.

I recently decided to setup fetchmail to poll my pop3 mail servers in the
background, download any waiting mail and pass it on to procmail for
sorting into appropriate folders and then access these folders using KMail.

This works well but I have realised recently that, because this is now
happening in the background, if I disconnect from my ISP without
thinking I can cut a mail download off in mid-stream. I have half an
e-mail to prove it.

Can anyone suggest a way to prevent this apart from running Fetchmail
manually?

Barry Samuels