As far as I know, the only crontab that's created by default in e-smith is the system-wide /etc/crontab. This runs cron.hourly thru cron.monthly, also in /etc (mostly stuff for keeping your logs from getting too big). If your system is not configured for multi-drop e-mail retrieval, that's all it does. With multi-drop, the template for /etc/crontab will produce a few additional lines for running fetchmail. By the way, you can always add your own user-specific crontabs (for root or other users) with the command crontab -u -e Comes in handy for running fetchmail for several users separately, for if you don't have a multi-drop mailbox at your mail service provider.