Not wanting to hijack the OP's thread but, yeah, it took quite a lot of web searching to find that solution - not really knowing what to look for.
Then, I had to find a workaround for the fact that the table is cleared on a firewall rule change.
Doktornotor pointed me to the shellcmd package and its "afterfilterchangeshellcmd" option. I use that to call a tiny PHP script that checks whether the table is empty. If it is, the connection to the sending host is restarted and the table is rebuilt.
Lots of fun :)