This is by design. First, uqwk doesn't know that you are just doing
mail replies, not news posts. Second, you could be sending uqwk
subscribe/unsubscribe requests. To determine up front that the
newsserver is not needed, uqwk would have to make an initial pass
all the way through the reply packet. This is obviously not a good
idea. Nevertheless, there ought to be a way to send mail replies
when the news server is down. Things to try if you really need to
send mail and the server is down:
set NNTPSERVER to an alternate public server (e.g. news.uni-stuttgart.de)
get a hold of the local spool (non-nntp) version of uqwk
(source is at ftp.gte.com, Makefile.nntp makes the nntp version,
Makefile makes the local spool version)