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.