Missing php-imap causes cron to fail

At the same time I was working on this I was having cron issues. I think that the missing php-imap libraries may have been causing BMH to cause cron to stall and fail. (Running BMH manually was giving 500 server errors.) I think BMH is the only thing using imap in my case, (everything else is smtp). I wonder if BMH should check for the php-imap libraries and fail gracefully if they are not found.