Why is procmail not filtering my incoming mail

I've never had any trouble getting procmail setup and working .. in
many years of using it and thru many different versions of linux,
including gentoo.

Now on a newish gentoo host I've been setting up that host to retrieve
mail. Its running sendmail procmail and fetchmail.

When I retrieve mail with fetchmail ... procmail never process it.

I have .procmailrc of many years standing including many changes of
course.  But nothing is happening with procmail at all.

No lines appear in .procmail.log and all mail lands at
/var/spool/mail/$myUSER

I've had so little trouble with procmail that I cannot even think how
to figure out what is happening.

head of .procmailrc below:

  #shell-script-*--
  PATH=3D/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin
  SHELL=3D/bin/sh
  DEFAULT=3D/var/spool/mail/$LOGNAME
  MAILDIR=3D$HOME/spool/in
  LOGABSTRACT=3DALL
  LOGFILE=3D/home/reader/t/var/log/procmail.log
  LOG=3D"$(echo =

  START
  Processing <$FILENO>)
  "
  VERBOSE=3DYES
  =

  PSCRIPTS=3D"/projects/perl"
  SCRIPTS=3D"/home/reader/scripts/"
  =

  [...]

Even if I have screwed up rule... I should at least see something in
procmail.log right?