offline-imap for backup (2010 edition)

[Michael Williams]

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

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).

It seems, however, that the most robust place to implement this would be in offlineimap itself. Any plans/news there?

As far as I can tell, no other tool is ideally suited to this (see http://ask.metafilter.com/161868/IMAP-backup). imapgrab (a wrapper around getmail) comes closest, but does not retain read/replied/etc. flags, i.e. it is not an exact copy.

-- Mike