Can Fetchmail just place mail into a folder instead of using the
local delivery agent?
Not as such, but a "local delivery agent" that delivers to a folder
can be written in one line of shell code in the fetchmailrc file.
For example:
mda "( echo -n 'From %F ' ; date '+%a %b %e %R:%S %Y' ; /bin/cat ; echo '' )
~/Mail/InComing"
This is essentially the same as what I am currently using, but note
that, as written, it provides no locking and hence no protection
against races between delivery and a mailreader. It also does not
handle resource-exhaustion problems (full disk). It works well
enough for me because I run fetchmail manually and check for problems
before manually deleting the mail from the server. I would *not*
recommend this setup for fully-automated operation.
You may need to tweak it a bit -- that "From " line is formatted as
my mailreader requires and is therefore somewhat non-standard.