Copying maildir from one computer to another

[Nicolas Sebrecht]

On Sat, Dec 13, 2014 at 07:02:52PM +0100, bjornmagnus wrote:

> There must be some trick to the .offlineimap directory, which i do not
> copy, as i suspect containts DB’s of the maildir files that are stored
> with non-relative paths (thus this would not work in my case as
> computer b is linux and computer b is OS X).
> 
> Any help would be appreciated :)

This might be the case. Honestly, I don't remember the exact format of
the sqlite database.

First of all, I would check the versions. Ascending updates of the cache
format is supported while descending is not. You might hit a
cache/database format unkown with a previous version on your destination
system explaining the full redownload.

Then, I would look for unexpected paths in the cache as you suspect.
Sqlite provides good tools to view/edit or export the database to text
format. It should be easy. In such case, remember there could be more
than one offending issue.

If so, it might worth patching offlineimap to move such per-system
references to a more global and accessible cache file. I think it would
be great to have offlineimap files supporting "exports" like you do
easily.

Good luck ! ,-)

-- 
Nicolas Sebrecht