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## 2 Configuring mairix

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

    # Your mail base folder
    base=~/Mail

This is the base folder for your mails. All the following directories, except the one for the database, are relative to this base folder.

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

Specify all your maildir/nnml folders and mbox files (relative to the base directory!) you want to index with mairix. Use colons to separate different files. See the man-page for `mairixrc` for details.

    mformat = mbox
    database = ... location of database file ...

This chooses `mbox` as the output format for the mairix search results. Currently, this is the supported format by mairix.el, but technically it should be possible to also use maildir or mh; it’s just not tested (yet).

You should make sure that you don’t accidentally index the search results produced by mairix. This can be done by pointing `mairix-file-path` to a directory which is surely not indexed by mairix. Another possibility is to use something like

    omit = mairix*

in the `.mairixrc` file, and prefix every search file you use with “mairix”.

    database = /home/user/.mairixdatabase

This specifies the name of the database file. Note that this is not relative to the `base` folder.

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.

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