1MAIRIXRC(5) File Formats Manual MAIRIXRC(5)
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6 mairixrc - configuration file for mairix(1)
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9 $HOME/.mairixrc
10
12 The mairixrc file tells mairix where your mail folders are located. It
13 also tells mairix where the results of searches are to be written.
14 mairix searches for this file at $HOME/.mairixrc unless the -f option
16 is used.
17 The directives base, mfolder, and database must always appear in the
19 file. There must also be some folder definitions (using the maildir,
20 mh, or mbox) directives.
21 Comments
24 Any line starting with a '#' character is treated as a comment.
25 Directives
28 base=base-directory
29 This defines the path to the common parent directory of all your
30 maildir folders.
31 If the path is relative, it is treated as relative to the loca‐
33 tion of the mairixrc file.
34 maildir=list-of-folder-specifications
37 This is a colon-separated list of the Maildir folders (relative
38 to `base') that you want indexed. Any entry that ends `...' is
39 recursively scanned to find any Maildir folders underneath it.
40 More than one line starting with `maildir' can be included. In
42 this case, mairix joins the lines together with colons as though
43 a single list of folders had been given on a single very long
44 line.
45 Each colon-separated entry may be a wildcard. See the discus‐
47 sion under mbox (below) for the wildcard syntax. For example
48 maildir=zzz/foo*...
50 will match maildir folders like these (relative to the base-
52 directory)
53 zzz/foobar/xyz
55 zzz/fooquux
56 zzz/foo
57 zzz/fooabc/u/v/w
58 and
62 maildir=zzz/foo[abc]*
64 will match maildir folders like these (relative to the
66 folder_base)
67 zzz/fooa
69 zzz/fooaaaxyz
70 zzz/foobcd
71 zzz/fooccccccc
72 If a folder name contains a colon, you can write this by using
74 the sequence '\:' to escape the colon. Otherwise, the backslash
75 character is treated normally. (If the folder name actually
76 contains the sequence '\:', you're out of luck.)
77 mh=list-of-folder-specifications
80 This is a colon-separated list of the MH folders (relative to
81 `base') that you want indexed. Any entry that ends '...' is
82 recursively scanned to find any MH folders underneath it.
83 More than one line starting with 'mh' can be included. In this
85 case, mairix joins the lines together with colons as though a
86 single list of folders had been given on a single very long
87 line.
88 Each colon-separated entry may be a wildcard, see the discussion
90 under maildir (above) and mbox (below) for the syntax and seman‐
91 tics of specifying wildcards.
92 recognizes the types of MH folders created by the following
94 email applications:
95 * xmh
97 * sylpheed
99 * claws-mail
101 * evolution
103 * NNML
105 * Mew
107 mbox=list-of-folder-specifications
110 This is a colon-separated list of the mbox folders (relative to
111 `base') that you want indexed.
112 Each colon-separated item in the list can be suffixed by '...'.
114 If the item matches a regular file, that file is treated as a
115 mbox folder and the '...' suffix is ignored. If the item
116 matches a directory, a recursive scan of everything inside that
117 directory is made, and all regular files are initially consid‐
118 ered as mbox folders. (Any directories found in this scan are
119 themselves scanned, since the scan is recursive.)
120 Each colon-separated item may contain wildcard operators, but
122 only in its final path component. The wildcard operators cur‐
123 rently supported are
124 *
127 Match zero or more characters (each character matched is arbi‐
128 trary)
129 ?
132 Match exactly one arbitrary character
133 [abcs-z]
136 Character class : match a single character from the set a, b, c,
137 s, t, u, v, w, x, y and z.
138 To include a literal ']' in the class, place it immediately
140 after the opening '['. To include a literal '-' in the class,
141 place it immediately before the closing ']'.
142 If these metacharacters are included in non-final path compo‐
144 nents, they have no special meaning.
145 Here are some examples
147 mbox=foo/bar*
150 matches 'foo/bar', 'foo/bar1', 'foo/barrrr' etc
151 mbox=foo*/bar*
154 matches 'foo*/bar', 'foo*/bar1', 'foo*/barrrr' etc
155 mbox=foo/*
158 matches 'foo/bar', 'foo/bar1', 'foo/barrrr', 'foo/foo', ´foo/x'
159 etc
160 mbox=foo...
163 matches any regular file in the tree rooted at 'foo'
164 mbox=foo/*...
167 same as before
168 mbox=foo/[a-z]*...
171 matches 'foo/a', 'foo/aardvark/xxx', 'foo/zzz/foobar',
172 ´foo/w/x/y/zzz', but not 'foo/A/foobar'
173 Regular files that are mbox folder candidates are examined
175 internally. Only files containing standard mbox 'From ' separa‐
176 tor lines will be scanned for messages.
177 If a regular file has a name ending in '.gz', and gzip support
179 is compiled into the mairix binary, the file will be treated as
180 a gzipped mbox.
181 If a regular file has a name ending in '.bz2', and bzip support
183 is compiled into the mairix binary, the file will be treated as
184 a bzip2'd mbox.
185 More than one line starting with 'mbox' can be included. In
187 this case, mairix joins the lines together with colons as though
188 a single list of folders had been given on a single very long
189 line.
190 mairix performs no locking of mbox folders when it is accessing
192 them. If a mail delivery program is modifying the mbox at the
193 same time, it is likely that one or messages in the mbox will
194 never get indexed by mairix (until the database is removed and
195 recreated from scratch, anyway.) The assumption is that mairix
196 will be used to index archive folders rather than incoming ones,
197 so this is unlikely to be much of a problem in reality.
198 mairix can support a maximum of 65536 separate mboxes, and a
200 maximum of 65536 messages within any one mbox.
201 omit=list-of-glob-patterns
204 This is a colon-separated list of glob patterns for folders to
205 be omitted from the indexing. This allows wide wildcards and
206 recursive elements to be used in the maildir,mh, andmbox direc‐
207 tives, with the omit option used to selectively remove unwanted
208 folders from the folder lists.
209 Within the glob patterns, a single '*' matches any sequence of
211 characters other than '/'. However '**' matches any sequence of
212 characters including '/'. This allows glob patterns to be con‐
213 structed which have a wildcard for just one directory component,
214 or for any number of directory components.
215 The _omit_ option can be specified as many times as required so
217 that the list of patterns doesn't all have to fit on one line.
218 As an example,
220 mbox=bulk...
222 omit=bulk/spam*
223 will index all mbox folders at any level under the 'bulk' subdi‐
225 rectory of the base folder, except for those folders whose names
226 start 'bulk/spam', e.g. 'bulk/spam', 'bulk/spam2005' etc.
227 In constrast,
229 mbox=bulk...
231 omit=bulk/spam**
232 will index all mbox folders at any level under the 'bulk' subdi‐
234 rectory of the base folder, except for those folders whose names
235 start 'bulk/spam', e.g. 'bulk/spam', 'bulk/spam2005',
236 ´bulk/spam/2005', 'bulk/spam/2005/jan' etc.
237 nochecks
240 This takes no arguments. If a line starting with nochecks is
241 present, it is the equivalent of specifying the -Q flag to every
242 indexing run.
243 mfolder=match-folder-name
246 This defines the name of the folder (within the directory speci‐
247 fied by base) into which the search mode writes its output. (If
248 the mformat used is 'raw' or 'excerpt', then this setting is not
249 used and may be omitted.)
250 The mfolder setting may be over-ridden for a particular search
252 by using the -o option to mairix.
253 mairix will refuse to output search results to a folder that
255 appears to be amongst those that are indexed. This is to pre‐
256 vent accidental deletion of emails.
257 If the first character of the mfolder value is '/' or '.', it is
259 taken as a pathname in its own right. This allows you to spec‐
260 ify absolute paths and paths relative to the current directory
261 where the mfolder should be written. Otherwise, the value of
262 mfolder is appended to the value of base, in the same way as for
263 the source folders.
264 mformat=format
267 This defines the type of folder used for the match folder where
268 the search results go. There are four valid settings for for‐
269 mat, namely 'maildir', 'mh', 'mbox', 'raw' or 'excerpt'. If the
270 'raw' setting is used then mairix will just print out the path
271 names of the files that match and no match folder will be cre‐
272 ated. If the 'excerpt' setting is used, mairix will also print
273 out the To:, Cc:, From:, Subject: and Date: headers of the
274 matching messages. 'maildir' is the default if this option is
275 not defined. The setting is case-insensitive.
276 database=path-to-database
279 This defines the path where mairix's index database is kept.
280 You can keep this file anywhere you like.
281 Currently, mairix will place a single database file at the loca‐
283 tion indicated by path-to-database. However, a future version
284 of mairix may instead place a directory containing several files
285 at this location.
286 path-to-database should be an absolute pathname (starting with
288 '/'). If a relative pathname is used, it will be interpreted
289 relative to the current directory at the time mairix is run,
290 (not relative to the location of the mairixrc file or anything
291 like that.)
292 Expansions
295 The part of each line in '.mairixrc' following the equals sign can con‐
296 tain the following types of expansion:
297 Home directory expansion
300 If the sequence '~/' appears at the start of the text after the
301 equals sign, it is expanded to the user's home directory. Exam‐
302 ple:
303 database=~/Mail/mairix_database
305 Environment expansion
309 If a '$' is followed by a sequence of alpha-numeric characters
310 (or ´_'), the whole string is replaced by looking up the corre‐
311 sponding environment variable. Similarly, if '$' is followed by
312 an open brace ('{'), everything up to the next close brace is
313 looked up as an environment variable and the result replaces the
314 entire sequence.
315 Suppose in the shell we do
317 export FOO=bar
319 and the '.mairixrc' file contains
321 maildir=xxx/$FOO
323 mbox=yyy/a${FOO}b
324 this is equivalent to
326 maildir=xxx/bar
328 mbox=yyy/abarb
329 If the specified environment variable is not set, the replace‐
331 ment is the empty string.
332
335 An alternative path to the configuration file may be given with the -f
336 option to mairix(1).
337 January 2006 MAIRIXRC(5)