[Novalug] configuring pine on local computer

[bdalzell at qis.net]

For some reason my isp is having problems with the mail serving computer so if i
use pine by going with ssh to the isp my mail box is very very sluggish (as in
10 to 15 minutes to open an inbox with 30 messages in it and sluggish to
reformat, etc) so i thought - how about using pine locally and pulling the
inbox contents over to my home computer?

i asked the isp for help in this but the guy i got said it could not be done.
however i once did do it in the past when i was using the amiga os (with an
amiga version of pine) but it was so long ago that I nolonger have the pine
setup files that enabled me to do it.

i have gotten this far:

downloaded and installed latestest version of pine on my ubuntu machine

using the gnome terminal (2.14.2)

started up pine, gave it mail.qis.net as the mail server.

it brings up a log in request at the bottom of the terminal. unfortunately it
wants to log me in under my local user name which is not my remote user name.

so i set up another local user with the same user name as i use remotely.

fine - now it wants the password for the remote user. however when I type the
password in the text is apparently not sent to the isp - only the carriage
return is sent.

i tried resetting the character encoding for the gnome terminal to iso 8859-1
but this has not made a difference.

any tips would be appreciated. i have complained to the isp about the super
sluggish e-mail problem and asked if they were trying to discourage people from
using pine and they said no, they were in the process of replacing the computer
but this has been going on all week and i have literally wasted entire working
days dealing with my e-mail.

right now i am using their very annoying web mail interface which works faster
but has some real limitations in terms of sorting e-mails, etc.

i really want my pine back.

i have tried mutt and elmo but I get a local error saying 
"/var/mail/me: No sucj file or directory" and then either one is hung up on
initializing.