How to access mailserver

[Andreas Tille <tille@physik.uni-halle.de>]

Hello,

I changed my work into a completely MS-dominated environment.
Now I've set up the first Linux box in this house.  Now my
problem is accessing a mailserver which is situated in another
house.  WHat is the recommended way to do that under
Debian (I'll soon want to upgrade to potato).  Formlerly
I lazyly used the complete mail service of the computing
center of our university but now I have to set up all
things myself.

Detailed questions are:
1) How can I fetch my mails from the mailserver periodically,
   say each 5 Minutes) and store them as local mail.
  I thought fetchmail would do the job but it seems to
  fetch mails only on user demand, right??
  I would like to get the mails from the server sended as
  mail and want the mails sended be deleted on the server.
2) I wonder how far mailagent is better than procmail for
  that purpose, because it tells that it has 
  "far more functionality than procmail" in the package
  description.

3) Are there any specials things to do or any special documents
  to read to solve that problem?

Kind regards

                 Andreas.