background process popping up in foreground
 

I am running bash v3.2.17 and when I try to run a process like fetchmail in the background (fetchmail &) it just pops up in the foreground saying how many messages it is downloading and if I hit the return key I get the shell prompt for a second and then fetchmail pops up again - is there any way to put the process in the background permanently until the job is done?

The output of some commands are still to the standard output even when ran in the background. You can usually resolve this by specifying and output file.

To output to a file
or to discard the output