After quite a search, I found that if I enter "biff n" in the command line, it would stop. That wouldn't do it. I searched further & found that if I put "biff n" in my bashrc & restart bash, it would work. That wasn't doing it either. Finally, I put "biff n" in root's bashrc & restarted ~that~ bash, went back to my user terminal & entered fetchmail -a. So far so good -- no more in.comsat messages telling me things I don't give a damn about. -- Speer's 1st Law of Proofreading: The visibility of an error is inversely proportional to the number of times you have looked at it. To unsubcribe send e-mail with the word unsubscribe in the body to: Linux-Anyway-Request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx?body=unsubscribe