Offlineimap, python3 and the gnome keyring

I'm a long time user of offlineimap. I use it via mu4e, which is my everyday mail client. I recently upgraded the system on my home machine to Xubuntu 20.04. And then the troubles began…

Note: this paper is not about learning to use mu4e or offlineimap. It is about making offlineimap run on recent linux distros.

python3

Xubuntu 20.04 conforms to the Debian politics regarding python: python3 is the default, and if you install python2, its support is minimal. I have no rants about this as python2 support is now discontinued.

The only problem is that many applications have not been ported yet and run with python2, and offlineimap is one of them. And the fact is that offlineimap is no longer included in the distribution !

offlineimap

Ok, so, is it possible to run offlineimap on Xubuntu 20.04 ? Let's try. After cloning the repository and checked the sources, all the necessary modules seem to be present in the distro, so lets `apt

install blah blah blah`.

First run gave a bunch of errors. Offlineimap allows you to add python code, in particular to handle tasks such as mailbox name translation between local names and remote names, or authentication.

That's the point: I used to write an authentication class in order to retrieve the authentication data for each imap host from the gnome keyring (I use extensively the gnome keyring to store all my

authentication data).

Alas ! my class relied of the `gnomekeyring` module, which does not exist anymore.

the gnome keyring (and python)

A little snarfing on the net informed me that now I should consider using the `keyring` module. After having a look at it, it appears that:

• it is Python3 only: why not, but offlineimap is python2…
• it claims to support a bunch of keyrings: Kde, gnome, MacOS, etc...

I tend to be very suspicious about software which claims to run on every hardware whatever the software configuration is. The sequel will acknowledge my view: I never managed to access the gnome keyring, my

little test program complained about a faulty dbus config.

So I temporarily gave up the idea of accessing the gnome keyring (I needed to quickly have a running email configuration !), and scratched a temporary solution using the `.authinfo.gpg` file from emacs with a shell pipeline and a bunch of lines of python code. At least it worked, even if not very satisfactory.

the gnome keyring (at last)

Finally, a couples of days ago, I stumbled across the `secretstorage` module, which claims to allow to access to the gnome keyring. After a quick test, I was convinced. It is simple to use, and it works !

Ok, but it's python3 only. Argh…

So… back to the offlineimap problem. Digging again on the net to find an attempt to port it to python3, and yes, I found it. The port works, but it also shows that unfortunately offlineimap is not in a very active developement status. It has been abandonned by its main maintainer, which claimed 4 years ago to work on a replacement

software, `imapfw`, but looking at the github page of this project, it seems totally stucked for 5 years !

So, where's the code ?

Oh, yes, for those interessed, I finally wrote a small python class which allows access entries in the gnome keyring containing authentication information.

The class is very simple to use, and relies on the following hypotheses:

• the searched entries are in the `login` keyring.
• the entries are identified by a pair (repository name, protocol). Both informations are encoded as attributes of the entry (`repo` and `protocol` attributes). I choosed not to use the label for identification. In my case all the entries have the same label, which is "offlineimap". It helps me to spot the offlineimap dedicated entries in the login keyring.
• Each entry, contains two other attributes : `host` (an imap host name) and `user` (the username used for the authentication on the imap server).

Here is the source :

Using this class, it very easy to write a little python script which will populate the keyring with the entries you need. for example, the following script will create or update an entry.