I picked up this handy trick recently while examining the GIO source code.

Despite the advanced network awareness in Evolution and E-D-S now, we still get complaints from people who connect to their ISP or to a VPN with various obscure command-line tools which for some reason doesn't work with the Netlink-based socket [1] used by GIO on Linux for network monitoring.

I found out you can override the default network monitoring module to force GIO to use a dumb fallback module which thinks it's online always.  I think this is used by default on other UNIX-like systems with no Netlink interface.

  GIO_USE_NETWORK_MONITOR=base evolution

Of course that command only overrides network monitoring for mail accounts.  For calendars and address books you'd have to start the factory services that way:

  GIO_USE_NETWORK_MONITOR=base /usr/libexec/evolution-calendar-factory

  GIO_USE_NETWORK_MONITOR=base /usr/libexec/evolution-addressbook-factory

I thought at least the mail part might be useful to mention here:

  https://help.gnome.org/users/evolution/stable/offline.html.en


[1] http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3549