Help knowing what to look for

[Linda]

I know what I would like to do, but am not smart enough to 
know what I need to look for to figure out how to do it. I'm 
hoping someone on the list can help me.
So here is the scenerio
I have a network that I occasionally access via dial in 
connection. Most of the work is text based so I can dial in 
via ckermit and if I need to work directly on a different 
machine then the one that answers the phone I can shh to any 
machine on the network from that machine.
However I sometimes need to access email on the imap server 
and on rare occasions it nice if some other people can 
access the email via dail in from a windows Machine. With 
10.04 LTS I had it set up so you could call as a specific 
user with kppp it would start pppd. Forwarding was turned on 
so user would set the route and thunderbird could then 
pickup mail from the imap server a very slow process but it 
worked in a pinch and was more convient and faster than 
spending an hour driving back and forth.
Currently I have the pppd connection working for the dial in 
machine. I can view its cups administration via the browser 
by entering the ip-address or the machine name. I can ssh to 
it via command line the same way. However any attempt to do 
anything on the machine with the imap server times out, and 
although I don't have any need to connect to the other 
machines they also all time out.
So any idea what I need to look at to solve the problem? 
Forwarding has to be working or I couldn't access the cups 
administration using the eth0 ip address. Although there is 
a firewall machine between the network and the internet 
dailing in is behind the firewall and I have not yet set up 
secondary firewalls on the internal machines.
And since there is always more than one way to solve a 
problem how would I go about actually running thunderbird on 
the answering machine and have it display on the machine 
that dials in. I have no idea what program or process I 
would need to do that so I can't find information on how to 
do it.
I guess the other option would be to return to my roots and 
run Pine. However it seems to me Pine created some menus and 
such so it was not totally text based. Is there an email 
program that is really texted based so I could dial in and 
read mail on the imap server? Of course this would not allow 
me to view attachments, but I could save them and transfer 
the files if need be and it would be faster at dial up speeds.
       Any ideas are suggestions would be greatly appreciated
                       Thanks