Enough With The Fetchmail Already!

I've been cruising the Linux help boards to see how others have setup Fetchmail for multiple users. It seems that most users are dealing with several external accounts but just one local user. I hope to set it up to grab messages from accounts belonging to each member of my family, and route the messages to each user's local mailbox. We're not sharing external accounts, so there isn't any reason to setup rules to route things. I've found a couple of ways to do this:

1. Setup a .fetchmailrc file for each user in the corresponding /home directory.

   This is good because each user can enter his/her own password information - keeping them all separate. Also, I don't have to be the "Emperor of Email" - having to e in charge of setups and changes.
   
   The down side is that each user has to run a separate copy of Fetchmail to get his/her mail to arrive. To have things startup at boot time, each user will need entries in rc.local (or whatever you use to startup programs) or setup a separate CRON job.




2. Setup one file to hold all Fetchmail configuration

   This file would be either /etc/fetchmailrc or /root/.fetchmailrc. I'm not sure which since this is what caused all of my troubles earlier.
   
   The pros: I don't have to rely on less experienced users to set things up correctly. As much as I don't want to be in charge of everyone's email, the reality is that most of the family members don't know or care how email works. They just want the messages to show up in the email client. If I were using option #1, I'd have to login as each person and setup the configuration.
   
   Also, the Fetchmail daemon mode will work with this config setup. No need to issue the command at each boot, or to have a CRON job (which I have no idea how to setup - another post...). This is the method I have been using on my current system.
   
   Cons: All of the passwords are kept in one file. Sure, it will only be visible to root, but it still doesn't seem to be good security practice. I'm sure at some point my kids won't want me to know their passwords, so some accounts will be left out of the system.

I think that I may have convinced myself to use option #2 - at least for now.

This post on Linux Questions outlines a setup very similar to mine. The author would like to use the individual user .fetchmailrc files and have the Fetchmail process start at boot time. So far, there have been no helpful suggestions.