Apologies if this seems an obvious answer...

... But I've been trying to work out if it's better to create a single long lived instance of the Imap object that exists over the entire Program or Thread/Task or if I should create an instance at the time I need the email information during the programming process.
Thinking it through and reading the RFC documents, I believe that a long running instance is the way to do it as long as the connection is kept alive or checked and re-connected to as required, but there isn't a clear explanation that I've found and each of the examples always Chilkat gives only show a single process with no reference as to how much "work" is acceptable for the instance.

Any pointers or advice or just confirmation would be great...