pine has long delay when sending mail via smail

[Joey Hess <joey@kite.preferred.com>]

I'm using pine as my email program, and smail as the MTA. When I send an
email, pine appears to wait until smail either delivers the mail or gives
up and queues it. It displays:

			[Sending mail |  100%   |]

at the bottom of the screen, and doesn't allow you to do anything else. In
some cases (emailing hosts that there's currently no route to on the
network), I've had to wait as long as 5 minutes before smail gives up
and queues the mail. It's really annoying that pine can't send mail in the
background. 

While pine is stuck waiting for smail, I see these processes running:

[joey@kite] ~>ps -ax |grep sendmail
13292  p1 S    0:00 /usr/sbin/sendmail -bs -odb -oem 
13293  p1 S    0:00 /usr/sbin/sendmail -bs -odb -oem 
13296  p0 S    0:00 grep sendmail 

According to smail's documentation, -odb should deliver mail in the
background, however:

       -odb   Deliver  mail in background, if mail delivery is to
              be performed.  Background delivery is not currently
              supported in the SMTP modes; foreground delivery is
              used instead.

And of course, I am sending this mail via smtp :-(

Other programs, like elm and mail can send mail in the background with no
delay. I thought about maybe having smail just spool the mail, and then
deliver when mail's cron job runs smail, but my work requires a constant
stream of email, and that'd just slow things down to much :-(

Does anyone know of a solution, besides changing over to sendmail or not
using pine?

-- 
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                      "He. He. He." - - Herman Toothrot