Best way to manage a polling/looping process?

Hi all,

I have a process that polls a mailbox every 15 minutes looking for new emails to use to instantiate another process.

At the moment I have it run on a start timer event, on a 15 minute cycle.

But this seems inefficient because it creates a new instance every 15 minutes, which generates (useless) data in the form of the process instance history. It also means when I start Bonita Studio on my laptop, all the 15-minute intervals that it missed while off, fire all at once, putting load on the mail server.

Which leads me to a question:

Would a loop work better? If so, what is the best way to start the process the first time after deploying it, and how do you make sure only one instance of the looping process runs at a time?

Cheers

Andrew

edit 21/06: corrected two typos