a couple of email related questions
 

is there a way to get fetchmail just to dump remote mail into a particular directory or do I need something like procmail?

my plan is to set up an agent to retreive mail from my university's mailserver, dump it into a local directory, and finally have popfile catagorize the mail. then I can just use my mail agent (sylpheed) to open the local sorted mail. does that sound feasible?

no one? :(

Straight from the man page:
"fetchmail is a mail-retrieval and forwarding utility; it fetches mail
from remote mailservers and forwards it to your local (client)
machine's delivery system. You can then handle the retrieved mail
using normal mail user agents such as mutt(1), elm(1) or Mail(1)."

If I'm not mistaken that should already do exactly what you're looking for. You should then be able to work with the mail stored in /var/spool/mail/<username>.