I have a remote Unix account in another country and reading a lot of mail over telnet with 'mail', 'mailx' etc is excruciatingly slow. They do NOT have POP3 or IMAP. How can I speed things up?
Piece of cake! You can fetch your entire mail file via ftp and read it locally using the -f switch of many email readers or loading it as a folder in kmail or other menu-driven mail readers. This is a typical session:

local% telnet remote.computer.etc ... remote% printenv MAIL  /var/mail/user33                                         (to see mail file location) remote% cd /var/mail remote% ftp local.computer                                (open ftp to local computer) ...                                                       (give local username, pass) ftp> bin      200 Type set to I.                                        (mail may contain binary chars) ftp> put user33 200 PORT command successful. 150 Opening BINARY mode data connection for ... 226 Transfer complete. local: user33 remote: user33 1412735 bytes sent in 1.1e+02 seconds (12.80 Kbytes/s) bye                                                       (back to remote computer) remote% rm /var/mail/user33                               (remove your remote mail all at once) remote% mail No mail.                                                  (logical, isn't it?) remote% logout (Don't worry about completely removing your mail file; you will get further email; if you don't believe that, send yourself an email at user33@remote. Of course, you can also choose not to remove it and let it grow slowly...) local% mail -f user33

And when you're done reading and sorting your email, you might consider using a .forward file, with your regular email address in it (don't forget the newline at the end, just in case, see one of the C-shell questions in this document).