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.
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.
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.
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.)
