[Nottingham] .fetchmailrc difficulties

[James Gibbon]

Hi folks,

I'm trying to instate a second fetchmail setup on my laptop,
differing from my main setup only in that it will not delete mail
from the (POP3) server.  However, each time I run fetchmail from my
laptop I only want to pull down _unseen_ mail.  This is so that I
can maintain a complete archive of mail I want to see on my desktop
machine without transferring mail from my laptop.

A look through the fetchmail man page suggests that this is quite
possible:

   (Keyword:  fetchall)  Retrieve  both old
   (seen) and new messages from the
   mailserver.  The default is to fetch only
   messages  the   server has not marked seen.

also:

   (Keyword:  keep)  Keep  retrieved messages
   on the remote  mailserver.  Normally, 
   messages are deleted from the folder on the
   mailserver after they have been retrieved.
   Specifying  the keep option  causes retrieved
   messages to remain in your folder on the
   mailserver.


Now, here's my laptop .fetchmailrc, with password suitably disguised
to protect the innocent:

set logfile="~/Mail/fetchmail.log"
defaults:
poll mail.virgin.net protocol pop3 username "james.gibbon" password "XxXXx"
        mda /usr/bin/procmail
        keep

.. as you can see, I don't have 'fetchall' set - so by default,
according to TFM I should be pulling down only unseen mail each
time I run fetchmail (with no command line args BTW).

However, in practice, while my laptop IS leaving mail on the server
for my desktop to pick up later, it is also pulling down down ALL
messages on the server each time, not just unseen messages - so that
to download new messages I have to download an increasing number of
old messages each time as well.

What am I doing wrong, anyone?

TIA
James