Asynchronous Gnus?

[David Abrahams <dave@boost-consulting.com>]

Hi,

I have an immediate problem and a broader question.  The immediate
problem is that the SMTP server I'm forced (by my ISP) to talk to is
fairly unresponsive.  When sending mail with message-mail, it often
seems to stop cold before anything happens.  Often the best way to get
mail to go out is to try sending a few times and cancelling with `C-g'
until it wakes up.  For any dedicated mail program, this is no problem
as it does all its SMTP transactions in the background.  Is there some
way to get Gnus to act the same way?

The broader question is about why all of Gnus can't be more
asynchronous.  Most of the problems I have with Gnus are UI
responsiveness issues that could be solved that way.  I've been told
that it's because Emacs doesn't have any notion of threads or
concurrency, but I guess I don't understand why that's a huge
obstacle.  For one thing I note that we have gnus-demon-add-handler so
there is a way to get it to do work "between keystrokes," as it were.
Probably more importantly, there are all kinds of things Emacs does
concurrently with processes that don't cause the whole program to lock
up, e.g. pcl-cvs.

Thanks for your time,
Dave

-- 
Dave Abrahams
Boost Consulting
www.boost-consulting.com