On Wed, 29 Jul 1998, Dave Millen wrote:

> There now seems to be an eternity of negotiation between my system and the
> remote host before each message is sent or received (anything up to a minute or
> more), although transfer times are as they should be.

Yes, I've noticed that too. I now defer dns lookups by putting 

    mda "/usr/sbin/sendmail -odd %T";

in .fetchmailrc, which makes fetchmail go fast, but then I have to do a
"sendmail -q" before my mail client will see the messages. At least this
can be scripted. The old way, fetchmail took so long, my isp would drop
the connection for inactivity.