Talk:OfflineIMAP

http://nicolas33.github.com/offlineimap/#signals says

 You can send SIGINT to OfflineIMAP using (~/.offlineimap/pid) to kill it. SIGUSR1 will force an immediate resync of all accounts. This will be ignored for all accounts for which a resync is already in progress.

Can someone please explain how to send a signal to a file?

In that file is stored PID (process ID) of the current running offlineimap process. You can use this number as an argument to kill command, to send signals. Like this:

kill -s SIGUSR1 `cat ~/.offlineimap/pid`

You can see more details here, Nixie 13:50, 7 February 2011 (EST)

Warnings

Before (re)adding more warnings about offlineimaps alleged lack of stability and the potential to cataclysmically delete all your mail, please provide some examples of where this has actually happenend. I have been using it exclusively for the last 3 years on at least 3 machines and have experienced no issues. I can't find a single forum thread describing any such massive failures and the repeated attempts to include warnings on this page is starting to look like scaremongering.

Jasonwryan (talk) 03:14, 6 March 2013 (UTC)

I can second Jason's view. I have been using offlineimap for well over ten years and have never experienced any kind of data loss in that time.

Nelefa (talk) 16:22, 15 July 2019 (GMT)

systemd timer

The whole part about killing OfflineIMAP in case of freeze should probably be removed, since offlineimap-oneshot.service includes:

TimeoutStopSec=120

It is being killed by default after 120secons. -- Midov (talk) 21:32, 15 April 2018 (UTC)

offline imap3-git patch [accepted in aur]

after confirming the updated package works, this whole section can probably just be removed.

installing offlineimap3-git did not work until after applying a patch to it.

upstream https://github.com/OfflineIMAP/offlineimap3 has moved from setup.py to pyproject.toml. their makefile still references setup.py but the file does not exist.

running makepkg -si after applying the following patch works for me to install offlineimap3-git package from https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/offlineimap3-git

 PKGBUILD | 9 ++++-----
 1 file changed, 4 insertions(+), 5 deletions(-)

diff --git a/PKGBUILD b/PKGBUILD
index 8b5946f..c98b07d 100644
--- a/PKGBUILD
+++ b/PKGBUILD
@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
 # Maintainer: Pi-Yueh Chuang 
 pkgname=offlineimap3-git
-pkgver=8.0.0.r38.gd29a4dc
+pkgver=8.0.3.r0.g0eac4e8
 pkgrel=1
 pkgdesc="Read/sync your IMAP mailboxes (python3)"
 arch=("any")
@@ -11,7 +11,7 @@ depends=(
     "python-rfc6555"
     "python-distro"
 )
-makedepends=("asciidoc")
+makedepends=("asciidoc" "python-build" "python-installer" "python-setuptools" "python-wheel")
 optdepends=(
     "python-gssapi: for Kerberos authentication"
     "python-portalocker: if you need to run offlineimap in Cygwin for Windows"
@@ -32,8 +32,7 @@ pkgver() {
 
 build() {
     cd "${srcdir}/${pkgname}"
-    make clean
-    python setup.py build
+    python -m build --wheel --no-isolation
 
     cd "${srcdir}/${pkgname}/docs"
     make man
@@ -41,7 +40,7 @@ build() {
 
 package() {
     cd "${srcdir}/${pkgname}"
-    python setup.py install --root="${pkgdir}" --optimize=1 --skip-build
+    python -m installer --destdir="${pkgdir}" dist/*.whl
 
     # install README
     install -Dm644 "README.md" -t "${pkgdir}/usr/share/doc/${pkgname}"
-- 
2.54.0

i would have created an account on AUR and reported the bug there, but account creation is temporarily unavailable. i emailed this patch to the maintainer as well. {{ -- —This unsigned comment is by Ozzloy (talk) 21:46, 15 June 2026 (UTC). Please sign your posts with ~~~~!

this patch has been accepted into offlineimap3-git:

https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/commit/?h=offlineimap3-git&id=173cd8cd21d2f03faca49bb6ccfecb0d1fc1863d Ozzloy (talk) 20:45, 30 July 2026 (UTC)