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#### 8.2.4 Setting up mairix

First: create a backup of your mail folders (see nnmairix caveats).

Setting up mairix is easy: simply create a `.mairixrc` file with (at least) the following entries:

         # Your Maildir/MH base folder
         base=~/Maildir

This is the base folder for your mails. All the following directories are relative to this base folder. If you want to use `nnmairix` with `nnimap`, this base directory has to point to the mail directory where the IMAP server stores the mail folders!

         maildir= ... your maildir folders which should be indexed ...
         mh= ... your nnml/mh folders which should be indexed ...
         mbox = ... your mbox files which should be indexed ...

This specifies all your mail folders and mbox files (relative to the base directory!) you want to index with mairix. Note that the `nnml` back end saves mails in MH format, so you have to put those directories in the `mh` line. See the example at the end of this section and mairixrc's man-page for further details.

         omit=zz_mairix-*

This should make sure that you don't accidentally index the mairix search results. You can change the prefix of these folders with the variable `nnmairix-group-prefix`.

         mformat= ... 'maildir' or 'mh' ...
         database= ... location of database file ...

The `format` setting specifies the output format for the mairix search folder. Set this to `mh` if you want to access search results with `nnml`. Otherwise choose `maildir`.

To summarize, here is my shortened `.mairixrc` file as an example:

         base=~/Maildir
         maildir=.personal:.work:.logcheck:.sent
         mh=../Mail/nnml/*...
         mbox=../mboxmail/mailarchive_year*
         mformat=maildir
         omit=zz_mairix-*
         database=~/.mairixdatabase

In this case, the base directory is `~/Maildir`, where all my Maildir folders are stored. As you can see, the folders are separated by colons. If you wonder why every folder begins with a dot: this is because I use Dovecot as IMAP server, which again uses `Maildir++` folders. For testing nnmairix, I also have some `nnml` mail, which is saved in `~/Mail/nnml`. Since this has to be specified relative to the `base` directory, the `../Mail` notation is needed. Note that the line ends in `*...`, which means to recursively scan all files under this directory. Without the three dots, the wildcard `*` will not work recursively. I also have some old mbox files with archived mail lying around in `~/mboxmail`. The other lines should be obvious.

See the man page for `mairixrc` for details and further options, especially regarding wildcard usage, which may be a little different than you are used to.

Now simply call `mairix` to create the index for the first time. Note that this may take a few minutes, but every following index will do the updates incrementally and hence is very fast.