offlineimap - Man Page

Synchronize mailboxes and Maildirs both ways or one either way.

Examples (TL;DR)

Synopsis

offlineimap (options)

Description

Synchronize the accounts configured in the configuration file via IMAP. Each account has two sides. One of the side must be an IMAP server. The other side can either be a Maildir or another IMAP server.

Works with Python 2.

Options

-h,  --help

Display summary of options.

--version

Output version.

-V

Output offlineimap version and additional imaplib2 information.

--dry-run

Run in dry run mode.

Do not actually modify any store but check and print what synchronization actions would be taken if a sync would be performed. It will not precisely give the exact information what will happen. If e.g. we need to create a folder, it merely outputs Would create folder X, but not how many and which mails it would transfer.

--info

Output information on the configured email repositories.

Useful for debugging and bug reporting. Use in conjunction with the ‘-a’ option to limit the output to a single account. This mode will prevent any actual sync to occur and exits after it output the debug information.

-1

Limit multithreading operations and run solely a single-thread sync.

This effectively sets the maxsyncaccounts and all maxconnections configuration file variables to 1 (the number).

-P <directory>

Set OfflineIMAP into profile mode.

The program will create DIR (it must not already exist). As it runs, Python profiling information about each thread is logged into profiledir. Please note: This option is present for debugging and optimization only, and should NOT be used unless you have a specific reason to do so. It will significantly decrease program performance, may reduce reliability, and can generate huge amounts of data. This option implies the ‘-1’ option.

-a <account1[,account2[,...]]>

Overrides the accounts section in the config file.

Allows one to specify a particular account or set of accounts to sync without having to edit the config file.

-c <path/to/configuration_file>

Specifies a configuration file to use.

-d <type1[,type2[,...]]>

Enables debugging for OfflineIMAP.

This is useful if you are to track down a malfunction or figure out what is going on under the hood. This option requires one or more debugtypes, separated by commas. These define what exactly will be debugged, and so far include options: "imap", "thread", "maildir" or "ALL". The imap option will enable IMAP protocol stream and parsing debugging. Note that the output may contain passwords, so take care to remove that from the debugging output before sending it to anyone else. The maildir option will enable debugging for certain Maildir operations. The use of any debug option (unless "thread" is included), implies the single-thread option ‘-1’.

-l <path/to/file.log>

Send logs to <file.log>.

-s

Send logs to syslog.

-f <folder1[,folder1[,...]]>

Only sync the specified folders.

The folder names are the untranslated foldernames of the remote repository. This command-line option overrides any folderfilter and folderincludes options in the configuration file.

-k <[section:]option=value

Override any configuration file option.

If "section" is omitted, it defaults to "general". Any underscores in the section name are replaced with spaces: for instance, to override option "autorefresh" in the "[Account Personal]" section in the config file one would use ‘-k Account_Personal:autorefresh=30’. Repeat this option as much as necessary to redefine multiple options.

-o

Run only once.

Ignore any autorefresh setting in the configuration file.

-q

Run only quick synchronizations.

Ignore any flag updates on IMAP servers. If a flag on the remote IMAP changes, and we have the message locally, it will be left untouched in a quick run. This option is ignored if maxage is set.

-u <UI>

Specifies an alternative user interface to use.

This overrides the default specified in the configuration file. The UI specified with ‘-u’ will be forced to be used, even if checks determine that it is not usable. Possible interface choices are: quiet, basic, syslog, ttyui, blinkenlights, machineui.

--delete-folder

Delete a folder on the remote repository.

Only one account must be specified/configured for this feature to work or you must provide one account with -a. The folder name must be provided with the remote separators (likely /) in UTF-8 if utf8foldernames is enabled or in IMAP otherwise. E.g.: "Remote/folder/name".

--migrate-fmd5-using-nametrans

Migrate FMD5 hashes from versions prior to 6.3.5.

The way that FMD5 hashes are calculated was changed in version 6.3.5 (now using the nametrans folder name) introducing a regression which may lead to re-uploading all messages. Try and fix the above regression by calculating the correct FMD5 values and renaming the corresponding messages.
Caution

Since the FMD5 part of the filename changes, this may lead to UID conflicts. Ensure to dispose a proper backup of both the cache and the Maildir before running this fix as well as verify the results using the ‘--dry-run’ flag first.

--mbnames-prune

Remove dangling entries for removed accounts or if mbnames is not enabled/used anymore.

Internally, offlineimap build intermediate mbnames files. They are added automatically when mbnames is enabled. However, disabling accounts so they are not synced anymore does not necessarily means they should be removed from the file built by mbnames. It is required to start offlineimap with this CLI option each time accounts are removed. When run, any account not in the accounts configuration option are removed in the mbnames file.

It is possible to manually remove intermediate files in <metadata>/mbnames/.

Notice this option honors --dry-run.

Synchronization Performance

By default, we use fairly conservative settings that are safe for syncing but that might not be the best performing one. Once you got everything set up and running, you might want to look into speeding up your synchronization. Here are a couple of hints and tips on how to achieve this.

  1. Synchronize more than one account.

    By default we only use one connection to an IMAP server. Using 2 or even 3 speeds things up considerably in most cases. In order to synchronize more than one account concurrently, consider starting one instance of offlineimap per account.
    Warning
    enabling the maxsyncaccounts and maxconnections options is deprecated since it’s known to have race conditions.

  2. Use folderfilters.

    The quickest sync is a sync that can ignore some folders. I sort my inbox into monthly folders, and ignore every folder that is more than 2-3 months old, this lets me only inspect a fraction of my Mails on every sync. If you haven’t done this yet, do it :). See the folderfilter section in offlineimap.conf.

  3. The sqlite cache.

    OfflineImap caches the state of the synchronisation to e.g. be able to determine if a mail has been added or deleted on either side.

    The historical status cache was a plain text file that was writing out the complete file for each single new message (or even changed flag) to a temporary file. If there was plenty of files in a folder this was bound to make things slow. The latest status cache is sqlite. This saves plenty of disk activity.

    The historical plain status cache is not supported anymore but migrating from a very old installation using the plain text cache is still supported. In this case, you may want to delete the old cache directory in <metadata>/Account-<account>/LocalStatus manually (the sqlite cache stands in the LocalStatus-sqlite folder). First, make sure you have run the new version of offlineimap for all your accounts so that the status cache was migrated.

  4. Use quick sync.

    A regular sync will request all flags and all UIDs of all mails in each folder which takes quite some time. A quick sync only compares the number of messages in a folder on the IMAP side (it will detect flag changes on the Maildir side of things though). A quick sync on my smallish account will take 7 seconds rather than 40 seconds. E.g. run a cron script that does a regular sync once a day, and does quick syncs ‘-q’ only synchronizing the ‘-f INBOX’ in between.

  5. Turn off fsync.

    In the [general] section you can set fsync to True or False. If you want to play 110% safe and wait for all operations to hit the disk before continuing, you can set this to True. If you set it to False, you lose some of that safety, trading it for speed.

Security and SSL

By default, OfflineIMAP will connect using any method that openssl supports, that is SSLv2, SSLv3, or TLSv1.

Do note that SSLv2 is notoriously insecure and deprecated. Unfortunately, python2 does not offer easy ways to disable SSLv2. It is recommended you test your setup and make sure that the mail server does not use an SSLv2 connection. Use e.g. "openssl s_client -host mail.server -port 443" to find out the connection that is used by default.

The FAQ has an entry on how to create your own certificate and CA certificate.

Unix Signals

OfflineImap listens to the unix signals SIGUSR1, SIGUSR2, SIGTERM, SIGINT, SIGHUP, SIGQUIT.

Known Issues

  • XOAUTH2

    XOAUTH2 might be a bit tricky to set up. Make sure you’ve followed the step to step guide in offlineimap.conf. The known bugs about Gmail are tracked at https://github.com/OfflineIMAP/offlineimap/labels/Gmail.

    Sometimes, you might hit one of the following error:

    • [imap]: xoauth2handler: response "{u’error': u’invalid_grant'}"
    • oauth2handler got: {u’error': u’invalid_grant'}

    In such case, we had reports that generating a new refresh token from the same client ID and secret can help.

Google documentation on "invalid_grant".

When you try to use a refresh token, the following returns you an
invalid_grant error:

  - Your server's clock is not in sync with network time protocol - NTP.
  - The refresh token limit has been exceeded.

Token expiration.

It is possible that a granted token might no longer work. A token might stop
working for one of these reasons:

  - The user has revoked access.
  - The token has not been used for six months.
  - The user changed passwords and the token contains Gmail scopes.
  - The user account has exceeded a certain number of token requests.

There is currently a limit of 50 refresh tokens per user account per client. If
the limit is reached, creating a new token automatically invalidates the oldest
token without warning. This limit does not apply to service accounts.

See https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/config/mgmt/v3/authorization and https://developers.google.com/identity/protocols/OAuth2#expiration to know more.

Main Authors

John Goerzen, Sebastian Spaetz, Eygene Ryabinkin, Nicolas Sebrecht.

See Also

offlineimapui(7), openssl(1), signal(7), sqlite3(1).
http://www.offlineimap.org

Referenced By

offlineimapui(7).

07/18/2024