<html><body><div style="color:#000; background-color:#fff; font-family:times new roman, new york, times, serif;font-size:12pt"><br><div style="font-family: times new roman, new york, times, serif; font-size: 12pt;"><div style="font-family: times new roman, new york, times, serif; font-size: 12pt;">On 11 Aug 2010, at 01:20, Anthony DiSante wrote:<br>> On 08/10/2010 06:53 PM, Ng Oon-Ee wrote:<br>>> On Tue, 2010-08-10 at 22:30 +0200, Michael Williams wrote:<br>>>> Has there been any changes to the suitability of offline-imap for backup (rather than bidirectional sync) since it was discussed on this list in 2007: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.mail.imap.offlineimap.general/824/focus=835<br>>>> <br>>>> As discussed then, bidirectional sync risks user error/filesystem problems being catastrophically propagated upstream. A couple of rather hacky and fragile workarounds were suggested (including taking a backup of the backup,
and checking the backup for changes since the last time offlineimap was run before allowing offlineimap to run again).<br>>>> <br>>>> It seems, however, that the most robust place to implement this would be in offlineimap itself. Any plans/news there?<br>>>> <br>>>> As far as I can tell, no other tool is ideally suited to this (see <a href="http://ask.metafilter.com/161868/IMAP-backup" target="_blank">http://ask.metafilter.com/161868/IMAP-backup</a>). imapgrab (a wrapper around getmail) comes closest, but does not retain read/replied/etc. flags, i.e. it is not an exact copy.<br>>> <br>>> If you haven't noticed, the maintainer has announced his retirement from<br>>> this project, and as yet noone else has stepped up to take over.<br>>> <br>> <br>> Well, I'd be interested in this one-way mode too. I'm currently using offlineimap, both for backup, and for a way to get local copies of
all my email for the purpose of running various scripts when certain emails come in. I never modify the data directories, but I didn't consider the possibility of filesystem corruption causing problems to propagate up to the live mail on the server.<br>> <br>> I haven't looked at the offlineimap code, and I'm more of a Perl hacker than a Python one; but doesn't it seem like, at least in theory, it'd be easy -- perhaps even trivial -- to prevent it from writing anything back to the server?<br><br>Since offlineimap is being more actively developed, has there been any progress since last year?<br><br>Mike<br>===================<br><br>Hi Mike<br><br>OfflineIMAP does its work in two steps: <br>1) copy mail down from remote server, saving it on the local folder (or local imap server) and the local message status flags cache. <br>2) copy local mails from the local folder (or local imap server) up to the remote server, saving status changes
again in the local message status flags cache.<br><br>So it looks like just doing step 1 would accomplish what you want - a one-way backup. With the warning that you could be overwriting some flags in the local message status flags cache - in other words, any changes to the message status flags, between backups, could be lost. Probably not a big deal when you're doing a one-shot backup.<br><br>It's really simple - Nicholas or Sebastian might have included this feature already - you should to put in a feature request just in case it's not.<br><br></div></div></div></body></html>