'Safe Harbor' version of offlineimap

[Dave Abrahams]

on Thu Jul 05 2012, Sriram Karra <karra.etc-AT-gmail.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Jul 2, 2012 at 4:26 AM, Dave Abrahams <dave at boostpro.com> wrote:
>
>     
>     >
>     > I wonder if we can ascertain the 'last best version' which appears to
>     > work for most loyal users, where most of us can park ourselves while
>     > Sebastien and others can figure out the quality issues.
>     
>     
>     +1000. I am just about to get rid of offlineimap and my colleague John
>     Wiegley has recently done the same because it has been messing up our
>     emails. This is terrible.
>
> Looking back at the responses to this thread, I feel we can say it is
> best to stick to 6.5.1[.x] if you can live with the issues that have
> been fixed since then. There have been hangs reported (I face them
> too) but nothing that a kill -9 cannot fix :-)

Well unfortunately 6.5.1.[.x] was having serious problems that I
couldn't get past.  So I'm back to a (slightly patched) next branch.  I
also spent the better part of a week looking at competing technologies,
and came up with no very satisfying results.  One combination that
*might* work really well is mailsync for my INBOX and imapsync for my
All Mail archive.  But I'm not sure it's worth the trouble.  

The biggest problem I'm having with the next branch of offlineimap now
is that it's constantly getting some scary-looking "ERROR" or other, and
quitting (I have a fairly long log of these things if anyone wants to
have a look).  But if, instead of panicking, I just run it again, the
problem seems to be resolved.  So I'm going to go back to using a
launchd process with KeepAlive, as I was doing before, and just tell
myself that, despite the fact that offlineimap has control over my
entire email history, these scary-looking errors are benign.  It's
uncomfortable but may be the best way to go.  Maybe I'll set up a
secondary account that accumulates all the messages it finds in All
Mail, just in case.

-- 
Dave Abrahams
BoostPro Computing
http://www.boostpro.com