Sharing ISDN

[Steve Witt]

I am at an international branch campus of a US university in Japan
and am trying to peice together a viable and inexpensive solution to
providing email access to students and faculty.  I have two ISDN lines
but the Japanese phone companies charge me by the minute for accessing
the lines plus a monthly fee.  We have plans to upgrade to more
bandwidth and an NT network.  I'd like to avoid the use of Web based
mail, so I am wondering if it is possible to run a mail server on a
linux machine using the router's network address translation feature
while also connecting workstations in the library to the same router.
Could people then Telnet to their accounts and access mail on Pine
without actually going out onto the ISDN lines?

Thanks,

Steve Witt
Librarian
Associate Professor
SIUC in Niigata
switt at siu.edu
switt at senzoku.ac.jp