Idea for optimizing gotmail

Hi,
I'm using gotmail and it works great !

I'm thought about running it frequently from a background-running shell
script, but gotmail seems to take some cpu time while running.

Would it be possible, as an option, to make a quick check and see
whether the inbox is empty or not ? I see gaim does this, as probably
other programs do.

This would spare a lot of work, in most cases where there's no new mail
:-)

Just my two cents...

Joël