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.