JavaMail: Keeping IMAPFolder.idle() alive

Question

I am making a program that needs to monitor a Gmail account for new messages, and in order to get them ASAP I am using JavaMail\'s idle feature. Here is a code snippet from

Answer 1

checking the message count every 5 minutes works for me:

new Thread()
{
    @Override
    public void run()
    {
        startTimer();
    }
    private void startTimer()
    {
        int seconds = 0;
        while (true)
        {
            try
            {
                Thread.sleep(300000);
                int c = folder.getMessageCount();    
            }
            catch (InterruptedException ex)
            {
            }
            catch (MessagingException me)
            {
            }
        }
    }
}.start();