Fetchmail has a "-s" option for silent that you may want to use if running it from a cron. According to the man page, it suppresses normal output, but not error messages. As for me, I tend to call fetchmail after I've logged in and leave it running as a daemon. I have a line in my .bash_logout file which kills off any running fetchmail. The only problem is, if I am logged in on more than one console, a logout on any of them kills fetchmail. I haven't bothered to figure this out yet, although I figure it can't be too hard. I've never even attempted to set up a system-wide fetchmail because I don't want my mail being pulled when I'm not near my computer.
