Blocking of SIGINT (ctrl-c), general feedback

[John Goerzen]

Nico Schottelius wrote:
> Good morning offliners,
> 
> I've been using offlineimap for some time and it mostly does
> a good job.
> 
> Though there's one thing that annoys me quite much, the handling
> of Ctrl-C: For some time offlineimap does not only ignore ctrl-c,
> but also leaves the shell in question in a state, where ctrl-c
> does not work anymore, also not for programs started after it.

I'm confused about that statement.  If OfflineIMAP ignores Ctrl-C, how
does it leave the shell in a questionable state after pressing it?

I imagine you're using a curses UI to produce this behavior.  I'm not
really surprised; after all, if you interrupt a program hard, then you
can expect your terminal to be messed up.  Pressing q might produce
better results for you.

> A different issue I've is synchronising a new IMAP folder
> with 160.000 messages in it, which has already taken about
> 6 hours in which only 100.000 messages where retrieved.

There are probably several things at work there.  OfflineIMAP is not
optimized for that work case, and will be requesting those messages
individually.  Whether or not the IMAP server can handle such requests
quickly is an open question.

Also, OfflineIMAP's local UID cache is not really optimized for it
either.  You can try disabling fsync in your ~/.offlineimaprc for a
performance benefit at the expense of potential incorrectness if your
system experiences a crash in the middle of a sync.

-- John