slow SMTP send blocks emacs

[Matt Price <matt.price@utoronto.ca>]

Hi folks,

 the SMTP server for my main account is often quite slow to respond to
 send requests, and wl seems to sort of hang, waiting until the
 transaction is complete.  With another mua this would be fine -- I
 would just go over to emacs and work while the message was sending.
 However, wl is *inside* emacs -- so I'm unable to use my main work
 tool during the delay time.  

So I suppose the question is:  does anyone else experience this?  And
is there a way around it?  Thanks as always,
Matt