Before I start throwing out ideas that I'm sure aren't new to readers here, I have a simple question that perhaps I should post to comp.unix.questions or comp.lang.perl, but.... Can I, and how would I, get a perl script to kick in and send out mail every few minutes when I am NOT logged in. Is this possible on Netcom?

Most public Unix systems will not let you do this, in my experience. The two Unix commands which usually give you the ability to run programs at regular intervals are "at" and "crontab". You can read the man pages and try running these to see if they are enabled for you. I had an idea for how to get around this, so that people could run batching remailers which sent out mail, say, every 30 minutes or whatever. (Unlike Xenon, I am of a generation which is accustomed to waiting more than a few seconds for mail to travel across the country!) The idea was simply for someone who DID have an account which would let them use at or cron, to run a program which would simply send a "ding" message (not to be confused with a "ping" message :) at regular intervals to a list of subscribers. This message could have a special header field so that the remailer programs could easily recognize it and take whatever action they wanted, like running Karl Barrus' script to scan a directory for pending outgoing remailer mail and send it out. (Karl has had batching running for months, as well as postage-stamp-based remailers (albeit with non-anonymous stamps). He is way ahead of most of this discussion.) Hal