[Dejital]

I have spent hours and hours configuring my `mutt`, `offlineimap`, `putmail.py`, but I have since grown disenchanted. In my experience, `offlineimap` is annoyingly prone to crashing without any indication. Thus, checking mail within `mutt` becomes unreliable. However, my favorite aspect of `mutt` has been and remains being able to send e-mails very quickly and easily through Terminal.

    echo "Hello World!" | mutt -s "Test E-mail" -a "file.txt" [e-mail]

Therefore, I now use `mutt` exclusively for sending mail and using Gmail.com for reading and searching mail.

[Sander_Marechal]

If you don't like offlineimap, why not run a true imap server instead? At home I have set up Dovecot + Postfix. I pull in all my remote mail through fetchmail and dump it into my own imap server. Works like a charm and it's not hard to set up.

I use Thunderbird + Muttator for reading from my laptop and mutt through SSH when reading from e.g. work. I can even read it from my Android phone and tablet.

[nvarsj]

Worse than that, offlineimap can be plain destructive in the right circumstances. I've had it arbitrarily delete thousands of messages due to the local cache being in a strange state.

[ChrisFrost]

You might try a similar program, mbsync (http://isync.sourceforge.net/). It's worked well for me during the past half-dozen years.

mbsync does not watch or poll for changes, but you can run mbsync in a loop from your shell. Or, if you are running Linux on the mail server and client and use Maildirs, you can run mbsync from mswatch (http://mswatch.sourceforge.net/). (Disclaimer: I'm the author of mswatch.)