Re: proliferation of messages on first sync

[James Stapley <james.stapley@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Paul,
I recently had a similar problem with Ubuntu LTS (8.4.3) with 
offlineimap 5.99.4 (the repository version of OfflineIMAP for this 
version of Ubuntu) and 6.1.2 (the manual 6.1.2 upgrade was an attempt to 
fix it). In the end turned out I had more than one instance of 
offlineimap running (and I thought the "lock" on the process prevented 
that).

I had a cron job managed no-UI version running, alongside an interactive 
version in a screen session in an SSH window - this caused very rapid 
proliferation of emails, and some confusion for me. See if it's tacking 
on lots of X-OfflineIMAP headers one after the other in the email 
headers - that seems to be what happens when you have 2 offlineimap 
instances running on the same folders. There is normally only one of 
these headers on each email.

Not sure if it's relevant, but I am syncing two IMAP servers with each 
other, one local and one remote for multiple users on each server.

Check to see you haven't got more than one offlineimap process running 
using something like:
sudo ps aux | grep offlineimap

On my machine this gives:
> user@host:~$ sudo ps aux | grep offlineimap
> user    4567  0.0  0.1   5164   832 pts/0    R+   17:57   0:00 grep 
> offlineimap
> root     28494  0.0  0.1   3944   564 ?        Ss   17:05   0:00 
> /bin/sh -c /etc/cron.hourly/offlineimap.sh
> root     28495  0.0  0.2   8908  1164 ?        S    17:05   0:00 
> /bin/bash /etc/cron.hourly/offlineimap.sh
> root     28513  0.2  7.4 253252 38012 ?        Sl   17:05   0:08 
> /usr/bin/python2.5 /usr/bin/offlineimap -c /home/user/.offlineimaprc
Ignore the first three lines, you can see the first one is the grep 
command (you can exclude this from the grep output by "using sudo ps aux 
| grep -v grep | grep offlineimap"), then the next two are the cron jobs 
watching offlineimap, but the fourth line is actually the offlineimap 
process.

You may have to use kill or pkill to get rid of one of your spurious 
processes, possibly with the -9 option.

I've migrated away from using the packaged versions which seem to be 
lagging badly behind the current OfflineIMAP releases and now compile my 
own when new versions are released.
I'm currently on v6.2.0.

Good luck!

James.




Paul wrote:
> Hi -
>
> I just ran Offlineimap 6.0.3 (the Ubuntu Intrepid packaged version) for 
> the first time, to sync my local laptop with my remote IMAP inbox, which 
> is hosted on a stock installation of Dovecot 1.0.3.
>
> There were 771 messages in the remote inbox when I started Offlineimap 
> and went to bed. In the morning, Offlineimap was still running, but it 
> had duplicated the messages in the inbox multiple times. When I stopped 
> the process, there were 2268 messages in both the local and remote 
> inboxes, and it was continuing to add messages.
>
> I didn't see any error notifications, and my .offlineimaprc file is 
> pretty close to the minimal version.
>
> Surely I'm doing something wrong. Where should I look to figure out what 
> it is?
>
> thanks,
>       Paul
>
>
>
>
>   



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