I had set up version 0.4.3 of RoundUp Tracker to run
the mail gateway when ever an email was recieved
(triggered a script). However, when I installed version
0.5.3 (fresh, clean install) this method would no
longer work. For some reason I could not get permission
to write to the database under that scenario.

Therefore, under 0.5.3, I set up the mail gateway with
cron job to POP the mailbox every 2 minutes.

I had it running like that for a couple of weeks
without incident.

Yesterday we had a network outage at the host where I
host my websites. I did get a lot of cron error
messages later in the day when the site came back up.

But I thought nothing further of it after seeing the
error messages in my email.

Today the system administrator notified me that I had
"lingering processes". 

There were six POP processes from two different
trackers that had not been killed after 24 hours.

The sysadmin feels that as a production script, the
mail gateway (and other parts of the script) should use
alarm() for processes that hang, or should clean up
after itself somehow if it crashes, etc...