Detect mail in inbox script

We lavage a ticketing system that is used to interact with customers. One of the methods that customers can leverage to interact with the ticketing system is email. The ticketing system will pull mail from a designated mailbox, parse it and inject the user data into a new or existing ticket. We’ve run into a couple of instances now where the ticketing system stops pulling mail and does not provide any type of warning or alert stating there is a problem (infact, it believe everything is still working properly). When this happens, we can sometimes go a day without realizing we have customers emailing us but the mails are simply waiting in the mailbox to be parsed. This obviously causes concern from a support performance perspective. Even though we’ve engaged the vendor to look into the problem, I’d like to develop a small script capable of detecting and alerting this problem in the future. The ticketing system pulls mail once a minute. I believe the best course of action would be to run a script via con on a linux cost that will login to the mailbox (perhaps every 5 minutes? It doesn’t need to be as aggressive as the ticketing system). The ticketing system also removes mail once it’s been processed. So other than mail that is waiting to be processed between 1 minute pulls, mail should not be present in the inbox. I’m unsure how easy it would be to detect if an email or emails exist between multiple pulls? But if we could detect the emails that exist in the mailbox and then during its next 5 minute pull determine if any of the same emails continue to exist in the next pull. Another option might be to look at the timestamps of the email. If any emails are present with a timestamp over 10 minutes of the current time, there is likely a problem as well. If you have any other ideas or possible methods, please present them to me. We would then either utilize a local mail server or another mail server that we have setup to relay a message to a manager to investigate a potential problem with mail in the ticketing system inbox. This functionality should be in the script as well. I would also like the script to send an alert if there is an issue connecting to the mailbox. From time to time we will update/change passwords for the mailbox for security reasons. If we forget to update the credentials in the script, I’d like it to have the ability to let us know there is a problem connecting to the mailbox it is monitoring.