Duplication caused by running offlineimap on multiple hosts

[Ryan Kavanagh]

Hi,

I'm following up here after having originally asked in the IRC channel.

I run offlineimap on my laptop and home server/desktop to retrieve mail
from a variety of servers (GMail, universities, etc.). To simplify my
explanation, we'll assume that I'm only syncing mail from one server, S.

What happens is that when I delete mail in folder F on my laptop, it
reappears in F shortly thereafter. Similarly when I delete mail on my
server. What I believe is happening is:

 1) I delete a message M from F on my laptop
 2) offlineimap on my laptop deletes it from S
 3) offlineimap on my desktop sees M in it's local copy of F, but
    doesn't see it in F on S, and so thinks it's new mail that should be
    synced to S.
 4) offlineimap on my desktop copies M to S
 5) offlineimap on my laptop sees M on S, sees that it doesn't have it
    locally and thinks that it's new mail that should be synced from S.
 6) offlineimap on my laptop copies M from S.
 7) M has reappeared in F on my laptop.

I haven't had the patience to check that this is actually what is
happening; I can do that at some point. I first noticed this issue a
year or so ago, but decided at the time just to sync mail on my laptop
instead of sorting it out.

Details on my setup:

My laptop runs Debian unstable, with offlineimap version 6.5.4.  My home
server/desktop runs OpenBSD 5.0, with offlineimap version 6.3.2.  Both
are syncing mail from remote servers to local dovecot, using the same
configuration file:
https://github.com/ryanakca/ryanakca-dotfiles/blob/master/.offlineimaprc
https://github.com/ryanakca/ryanakca-dotfiles/blob/master/.offlineimap.py

Any ideas on what could be causing the above issue?

Best wishes,
Ryan

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