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.