mairixrc(5)
NAME
mairixrc - configuration file for mairix(1)
SYNOPSIS
$HOME/.mairixrc
DESCRIPTION
The mairixrc file tells mairix where your mail folders are located. It
also tells mairix where the results of searches are to be written.
mairix searches for this file at $HOME/.mairixrc unless the -f option
is used.
The directives base, mfolder, and database must always appear in the
file. There must also be some folder definitions (using the maildir,
mh, or mbox) directives.
Comments
Any line starting with a '#' character is treated as a comment.
Directives
base=base-directory
This defines the path to the common parent directory of all your
maildir folders.
If the path is relative, it is treated as relative to the
location of the mairixrc file.
maildir=list-of-folder-specifications
This is a colon-separated list of the Maildir folders (relative
to `base') that you want indexed. Any entry that ends `...' is
recursively scanned to find any Maildir folders underneath it.
More than one line starting with `maildir' can be included. In
this case, mairix joins the lines together with colons as though
a single list of folders had been given on a single very long
line.
Each colon-separated entry may be a wildcard. See the
discussion under mbox (below) for the wildcard syntax. For
example
maildir=zzz/foo*...
will match maildir folders like these (relative to the base-
directory)
zzz/foobar/xyz
zzz/fooquux
zzz/foo
zzz/fooabc/u/v/w
and
maildir=zzz/foo[abc]*
will match maildir folders like these (relative to the
folder_base)
zzz/fooa
zzz/fooaaaxyz
zzz/foobcd
zzz/fooccccccc
If a folder name contains a colon, you can write this by using
the sequence '\:' to escape the colon. Otherwise, the backslash
character is treated normally. (If the folder name actually
contains the sequence '\:', you're out of luck.)
mh=list-of-folder-specifications
This is a colon-separated list of the MH folders (relative to
`base') that you want indexed. Any entry that ends '...' is
recursively scanned to find any MH folders underneath it.
More than one line starting with 'mh' can be included. In this
case, mairix joins the lines together with colons as though a
single list of folders had been given on a single very long
line.
Each colon-separated entry may be a wildcard, see the discussion
under maildir (above) and mbox (below) for the syntax and
semantics of specifying wildcards.
mairix recognizes the types of MH folders created by the
following email applications:
* xmh
* sylpheed
* claws-mail
* evolution
* NNML
* Mew
mbox=list-of-folder-specifications
This is a colon-separated list of the mbox folders (relative to
`base') that you want indexed.
Each colon-separated item in the list can be suffixed by '...'.
If the item matches a regular file, that file is treated as a
mbox folder and the '...' suffix is ignored. If the item
matches a directory, a recursive scan of everything inside that
directory is made, and all regular files are initially
considered as mbox folders. (Any directories found in this scan
are themselves scanned, since the scan is recursive.)
Each colon-separated item may contain wildcard operators, but
only in its final path component. The wildcard operators
currently supported are
*
Match zero or more characters (each character matched is
arbitrary)
?
Match exactly one arbitrary character
[abcs-z]
Character class : match a single character from the set a, b, c,
s, t, u, v, w, x, y and z.
To include a literal ']' in the class, place it immediately
after the opening '['. To include a literal '-' in the class,
place it immediately before the closing ']'.
If these metacharacters are included in non-final path
components, they have no special meaning.
Here are some examples
mbox=foo/bar*
matches 'foo/bar', 'foo/bar1', 'foo/barrrr' etc
mbox=foo*/bar*
matches 'foo*/bar', 'foo*/bar1', 'foo*/barrrr' etc
mbox=foo/*
matches 'foo/bar', 'foo/bar1', 'foo/barrrr', 'foo/foo', foo/x'
etc
mbox=foo...
matches any regular file in the tree rooted at 'foo'
mbox=foo/*...
same as before
mbox=foo/[a-z]*...
matches 'foo/a', 'foo/aardvark/xxx', 'foo/zzz/foobar',
foo/w/x/y/zzz', but not 'foo/A/foobar'
Regular files that are mbox folder candidates are examined
internally. Only files containing standard mbox 'From '
separator lines will be scanned for messages.
If a regular file has a name ending in '.gz', and gzip support
is compiled into the mairix binary, the file will be treated as
a gzipped mbox.
If a regular file has a name ending in '.bz2', and bzip support
is compiled into the mairix binary, the file will be treated as
a bzip2'd mbox.
More than one line starting with 'mbox' can be included. In
this case, mairix joins the lines together with colons as though
a single list of folders had been given on a single very long
line.
mairix performs no locking of mbox folders when it is accessing
them. If a mail delivery program is modifying the mbox at the
same time, it is likely that one or messages in the mbox will
never get indexed by mairix (until the database is removed and
recreated from scratch, anyway.) The assumption is that mairix
will be used to index archive folders rather than incoming ones,
so this is unlikely to be much of a problem in reality.
mairix can support a maximum of 65536 separate mboxes, and a
maximum of 65536 messages within any one mbox.
omit=list-of-glob-patterns
This is a colon-separated list of glob patterns for folders to
be omitted from the indexing. This allows wide wildcards and
recursive elements to be used in the maildir,mh, andmbox
directives, with the omit option used to selectively remove
unwanted folders from the folder lists.
Within the glob patterns, a single '*' matches any sequence of
characters other than '/'. However '**' matches any sequence of
characters including '/'. This allows glob patterns to be
constructed which have a wildcard for just one directory
component, or for any number of directory components.
The _omit_ option can be specified as many times as required so
that the list of patterns doesn't all have to fit on one line.
As an example,
mbox=bulk...
omit=bulk/spam*
will index all mbox folders at any level under the 'bulk'
subdirectory of the base folder, except for those folders whose
names start 'bulk/spam', e.g. 'bulk/spam', 'bulk/spam2005' etc.
In constrast,
mbox=bulk...
omit=bulk/spam**
will index all mbox folders at any level under the 'bulk'
subdirectory of the base folder, except for those folders whose
names start 'bulk/spam', e.g. 'bulk/spam', 'bulk/spam2005',
bulk/spam/2005', 'bulk/spam/2005/jan' etc.
nochecks
This takes no arguments. If a line starting with nochecks is
present, it is the equivalent of specifying the -Q flag to every
indexing run.
mfolder=match-folder-name
This defines the name of the folder (within the directory
specified by base) into which the search mode writes its output.
(If the mformat used is 'raw' or 'excerpt', then this setting is
not used and may be omitted.)
The mfolder setting may be over-ridden for a particular search
by using the -o option to mairix.
mairix will refuse to output search results to a folder that
appears to be amongst those that are indexed. This is to
prevent accidental deletion of emails.
If the first character of the mfolder value is '/' or '.', it is
taken as a pathname in its own right. This allows you to
specify absolute paths and paths relative to the current
directory where the mfolder should be written. Otherwise, the
value of mfolder is appended to the value of base, in the same
way as for the source folders.
mformat=format
This defines the type of folder used for the match folder where
the search results go. There are four valid settings for
format, namely 'maildir', 'mh', 'mbox', 'raw' or 'excerpt'. If
the 'raw' setting is used then mairix will just print out the
path names of the files that match and no match folder will be
created. If the 'excerpt' setting is used, mairix will also
print out the To:, Cc:, From:, Subject: and Date: headers of the
matching messages. 'maildir' is the default if this option is
not defined. The setting is case-insensitive.
database=path-to-database
This defines the path where mairix's index database is kept.
You can keep this file anywhere you like.
Currently, mairix will place a single database file at the
location indicated by path-to-database. However, a future
version of mairix may instead place a directory containing
several files at this location.
path-to-database should be an absolute pathname (starting with
'/'). If a relative pathname is used, it will be interpreted
relative to the current directory at the time mairix is run,
(not relative to the location of the mairixrc file or anything
like that.)
follow_mbox_symlinks
This takes no arguments. By default, mairix will skip symlinks
to mboxes when indexing. If a line starting with
follow_mbox_symlinks is present, mairix will follow them instead
of skipping them.
Expansions
The part of each line in '.mairixrc' following the equals sign can
contain the following types of expansion:
Home directory expansion
If the sequence '~/' appears at the start of the text after the
equals sign, it is expanded to the user's home directory.
Example:
database=~/Mail/mairix_database
Environment expansion
If a '$' is followed by a sequence of alpha-numeric characters
(or _'), the whole string is replaced by looking up the
corresponding environment variable. Similarly, if '$' is
followed by an open brace ('{'), everything up to the next close
brace is looked up as an environment variable and the result
replaces the entire sequence.
Suppose in the shell we do
export FOO=bar
and the '.mairixrc' file contains
maildir=xxx/$FOO
mbox=yyy/a${FOO}b
this is equivalent to
maildir=xxx/bar
mbox=yyy/abarb
If the specified environment variable is not set, the
replacement is the empty string.
NOTES
An alternative path to the configuration file may be given with the -f option to mairix(1). January 2006 MAIRIXRC(5)
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