Ubuntu Manpage: mairixrc - configuration file for mairix(1)

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.

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.)

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)