I had the same problems with Offlineimap while running it as a long-lived background process, and wasn't able to find any clean way to resolve them. Nowadays I

I had the same problems with Offlineimap while running it as a long-lived background process, and wasn't able to find any clean way to resolve them. Nowadays I have a cron script that kills any existing Offlineimap processes, and allows a new one to run through once. Works perfectly.