Check email when it arrives?

Question

I want to get the email from my gmail account via IMAP with a python script. I was wondering how I could know that an email arrived. Is there a way to get a notification when an email arrives? Right now I am just polling the mailbox every 5 seconds, which seems like a waste of bandwidth, because I plan to leave the script running for long periods of time. Thanks for any help in advance.

Answer 1

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMAP_IDLE

Answer 2

J2EE Tutorials- http://learnj2ee.info/