Or, at least hopefully it's solved... :) had to be running fetchmail as root, as several people pointed out to me.
Also had to add a couple of extra lines to the config file so that it would not reject non-matching addresses. final .fetchmailrc looks something like this: #cat .fetcmailrc poll sakima.octoraro.org localdomains meteu.octoraro.org user xxxxxx pass xxxxxx to flip * fetchall mda "/usr/sbin/sendmail -oem -f %F %T" thanks for the help :) - flip ------------------------------------- [EMAIL PROTECTED]/[EMAIL PROTECTED] -- "Really don't mind if you sit this one out. My words but a whisper -- your deafness a shout." -- Jethro Tull, Thick as a Brick