Command line check gmail

[Donn]

Hi all,
I am going to be moving home (in a while) and may be without net connection 
for anything up to 6 months. I don't want to lose my gmail account and 
thought I'd ask for ideas.

1. Is there any way I can setup a cron to send a short email from my account? 
(say I send it to my own account to - just to ping gmail and fake my 
activity)
2. Is just sending the odd email (say every 30 days) enough to keep the gmail 
account alive? Do I have to recieve (read) mail too?

My brother-in-law is renting a virtual server and it runs Debian (I think) - 
so I would ssh into that and setup the cron on that machine so that it keeps 
the gmail account alive.

Any ideas?

/d