Patent ID: 8626841

Claim:
A communications system, comprising: a network engine comprising a processor configured to communicate with a plurality of user subscribed mobile wireless communications devices via a communications network for sending and receiving emails therefrom; and a direct access server comprising a processor configured to operate with the network engine for polling different electronic mailboxes of users each corresponding to an email source and retrieving email from the electronic mailboxes and pushing any email through the network engine to selected user subscribed mobile wireless communications devices, and an IMAP-Idle manager configured to: establish IMAP-Idle connections to each of the electronic mailboxes of each user using the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) for supporting real-time notifications, for each of the electronic mailboxes, set a connection limit for the number of IMAP-Idle connections to each of the electronic mailboxes; and when an IMAP-Idle connection limit to one of the electronic mailboxes is reached or exceeded, mark the one electronic mailbox as IMAP-Idle disabled, such that subsequent IMAP-Idle connection attempts will fail and an account associated with the one electronic mailbox will not be subscribed to in the future, preventing any future IMAP-Idle connections to the one electronic mailbox.