Comment 5 for bug 364481

I am also experiencing this issue - and I run offlineimap in a similar way: launched from a shell script via cron every five minutes.

My shell script sleeps for 10 and then kills the child offlineimap process if it is still running. This is because of another bug where offlineimap will hang indefinitely if it is unable to reach one of the IMAP servers ( or if my internet connection terminates temporarily ).