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This document is a WORK IN PROGRESS.
This is just a quick personal cheat sheet: treat its contents with caution!

offlineimap

offlineimap is a Python utility to locally sync emails from IMAP servers.

After trying it, I do not use it for those reasons:

  • offlineimap brings dotfile madness with a ~/.offlineimap folder and a ~/.offlineimaprc file (I did not found any way to avoid it).

  • If you are using offlineimap with a cyphered mailbox (like a ProtonMail one) your emails won't be cyphered locally after syncing.

  • The current available version (v6.5.6) has still some annoying bugs.

Reference(s)

Table of contents

Install

# emerge -a offlineimap

# pacman -S offlineimap

# apt install offlineimap

# yum install offlineimap

# dnf install offlineimap

Config

Configure offlineimap (pay attention to the remoteport, remotehost, remoteuser and remotepass settings): 

$ vi ~/.offlineimaprc

    > [general]
    > accounts = main
    >
    >
    > [Account main]
    > localrepository = main-local
    > remoterepository = main-remote
    >
    > # full refresh, in min
    > autorefresh = 0.2
    >
    > # quick refreshs between each full refresh
    > quick = 10
    >
    > # update notmuch index after sync
    > #postsynchook = notmuch new # if you intend to use notmuch
    >
    >
    > [Repository main-local]
    > type = Maildir
    > localfolders = ~/.mail
    >
    > # delete remote mails that were deleted locally
    > sync_deletes = no
    >
    >
    > [Repository main-remote]
    > type = IMAP
    > remoteport = 1143 # imap port for protonmail-bridge
    > remotehost = 127.0.0.1 # host for local protonmail-bridge
    > remoteuser = <your-user-email-address>
    > remotepass = <your-user-pass> # if any, otherwise comment this line
    > keepalive = 60
    > holdconnectionopen = yes
    >
    > # delete local mails that were deleted on the remote server
    > expunge = yes
    >
    > # sync only these folders
    > folderfilter = lambda foldername: foldername in ['INBOX', 'Archive', 'Sent']
    >
    > # is broken, but connecting locally to bridge so should be ok
    > ssl = no

Use

Simply run: 

$ offlineimap

Troubleshooting

Known bug in offlineimap v6.5.6:

If you get the following error: OperationalError: unable to open database file

  • In my case, it happened because the status file of the folder on ~/.offlineimap directory was corrupted because of a system crash. Deleting this file and setting status_backend = plain in ~/.offlineimaprc didn't help.

  • The solution I found (very bad, though) was to delete the status file (e.g.:, ~/.offlineimap/Account-XXX/LocalStatus/folder_name and the entire folder in $MAIL directory and re sync everything again.

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