Why can't I echo the password to fetchmail?

I'm trying to configure a fetchmail. Before I deal with the syntax of fetchmailrc ( I discovered that the level of bugginess of a problem is synergistic with the number of different aspects of the problem that I do not understand, so one new thing at a time ), I decided to pass all the options via commandline. I got tired of entering the password for each test so I wanted to pass it in the script. I couldn't find something like --pass as a commandline option for fetchmail so I thought maybe echo the password to fetchmail ala: echo "dohadeer"| fetchmail --all -p pop3 -k pop.gmail.com --ssl -d0 --user FakeName@gmail.com I dismissed it and googled "fetchmail password commandline" and got several hits which claimed the above technique worked! But when I tried it I get the error: fetchmail: can't find a password for FakeName@gmail.com@pop.gmail.com. I can figure out workarounds for the original problem, but I can't figure out why this approach doesn't work. Obviously there is something I don't understand about Linux and want to figure out.