Re: Question about prohibition against multiple clients

[John Goerzen <jgoerzen@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu July 5 2007 8:02:20 pm Richard Cobbe wrote:
>
>    MULTIPLE INSTANCES
>        OfflineIMAP is not designed to have several instances (for
> instance,  a cron  job  and  an  interactive  invocation)  run over the
> same mailbox simultaneously.
>
> I'm not quite sure what this means by "the same mailbox."  Is this
> referring to the same maildir storage area, or is it broader than that?
>
> I ask because I have two different computers, and I'd like to sync both
> with the same account on the same IMAP server.  Is it safe to have one
> instance of offlineimap running on each machine, pointed at the same IMAP
> account?

Yes, that is safe.  The prohibition is to running more than one copy of 
OfflineIMAP on the same account on the same client machine simultaneously.  
OfflineIMAP will usually detect this condition automatically and abort, but 
there are some situations (/home mounted of NFS, perhaps) where it may not 
be able to detect that.  Basically, you don't want two OfflineIMAPs writing 
to ~/.offlineimap/ simultaneously, or two OfflineIMAPs working over the same 
Maildir.

I routinely have numerous machines running OfflineIMAP all syncing to the 
same IMAP server account.

-- John