However, offlineimap crashes too often. Every couple of days I will fail to get any new mail for an hour or two, and realize that offlineimap has crashed. And due to Murphy’s law this generally correlates with a time when I was recieving some important mail.

The solution is very simple. I am using zenity, a command line tool for displaying dialog boxes, and running offline imap in a loop. Every time it dies, I get a pop-up dialog, and can say OK to restart it, or Cancel to end the loop. The little shell script to do this is as follows:

#!/bin/sh

/usr/bin/offlineimap -u TTY.TTYUI;

while zenity –question –text “Offlineimap died. Restart?”; do

/usr/bin/offlineimap -u TTY.TTYUI;

done