[[!meta  title="OfflineIMAP"]]

Our internet connection from home is somewhat flaky, and long-running
connections are often dropped.  This is not usually a problem, I just
make liberal use of [[screen]] when using [[SSH]].  The dropped
connections *are* annoying when I'm reading my mail over [IMAP][] with
[[mutt]], my prefered mail client.  Mutt caches many changes (marking
messages as read, deleting messages, etc.) and only pushes the changes
to the remote IMAP server periodically.  If the connection drops
before Mutt pushes those changes, your changes get lost, and you have
to reconnect and work through the mail again.

It would be nice if I could work through my mail locally, and use a
more robust tool to deal with the networking side of things.  There
are a number of tools to accomplish this, including the vernerable
[fetchmail][], but I use [OfflineIMAP][] because it allows me to store
my mail locally while retaining direct IMAP access if I need it
(e.g. using webmail from an internet cafe).

Install (on [Gentoo][]) with

    # emerge -av net-mail/offlineimap

If you're running Python >= 2.7.2rc1 you'll need OfflineIMAP >= 6.3.3
to avoid problems such as `Unknown IMAP4 command: 'file'`.

Then create `~/.offlineimaprc` following the provided examples.  To
sync my Drexel account with my local machine, I use something like:

    [general]
    accounts = Drexel

    [Account Drexel]
    localrepository = DrexelLocal
    remoterepository = DrexelRemote

    [Repository DrexelLocal]
    type = Maildir
    localfolders = ~/mail/drexel
    sep = /

    [Repository DrexelRemote]
    type = IMAP
    ssl = yes
    remotehost = imap.mail.drexel.edu
    remoteuser = REDACTED
    remotepass = REDACTED

Then run `offlineimap` to start the bidirectional syncronization.
With the configuration above, you'll need to drop OfflineIMAP into a
`cron` job (or just run it before you want to read your mail, and
again after you've made any local changes).

If you want to run OfflineIMAP continuously as a daemon, take a look
at the `autorefresh` configuration option.

[IMAP]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Message_Access_Protocol
[fetchmail]: http://www.fetchmail.info/
[offlineimap]: https://github.com/nicolas33/offlineimap
[Gentoo]: http://www.gentoo.org/