Offlineimap behind a proxy?

[RW]

On Thu, 5 Apr 2012 14:12:08 +0800
Oon-Ee Ng wrote:

> Hi, I'm at a new workplace which handles internet connections
> differently from how my old one did. In particular, all internet
> access is done through proxy.workplace.name.com:8080
> 
> I've set http_proxy, https_proxy, and ftp_proxy in my shell profile as
> well as the appropriate values in apps like Firefox. Now coming to
> offlineimap, is there any configuration option for proxying, or does
> it honor http_proxy and siblings? 

If your proxy operates on a single port then it's just an http proxy,
with ftp etc supported over http - this wont support IMAP.

There are a couple of ways you might get around this, but it's likely
to be more trouble than it's worth.

1. Use stunnel to tunnel through the proxy with an http CONNECT
request. The last time I looked this required patching and building
stunnel from source, although it may be a standard feature by now.
This is unlikely to work, as the admins will almost certainly
have limited CONNECT requests to the https port.


2. There's software (I can't remember the name) that allows connections
to be tunneled through http but it requires you to run your own
external server to terminate the tunnel and relay the connection to
gmail. 


What you probably need is access to a separate SOCKS proxy.