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.