mairix - A Maildir and MH indexer and searcher

mairix [-f path] [-p] [-v] [-t] [-a] [expr1] ... [exprn]

mairix has functions for indexing and searching Maildir and MH directories of mail messages.

mairix has two modes of use : index building and searching. The searching mode runs whenever the command line contains any expressions to search for. Otherwise, the indexing mode is run.

The output of the search mode is usually placed in a _virtual folder_. This is just a normal maildir directory (i.e. containing `new', `tmp' and `cur') subdirectories, or a MH directory, so you can open it as a normal folder in your mail program. You configure the path for this virtual folder in your `~/.mairixrc' file. mairix will populate the virtual folder with symbolic links pointing to the paths of the real messages that were matched by the search expression.(1)

If desired, mairix can produce just a list of files that match the search expression and omit the building of the virtual folder. This mode of operation may be useful in communicating the results of the search to other programs.

mairix accepts the following options:

-f path

The `-f' flag allows a different path to the `mairixrc' file to be given, replacing the default of `~/.mairixrc'.

-p

The `-p' flag is used in indexing mode. Indexing works incrementally. When new messages are found, they are scanned and information about the words they contain is appended onto the existing information. When messages are deleted, holes are normally left in the message sequence. These holes take up space in the database file. The `-p' flag (meaning _purge_) will compress the deleted paths out of the database to save space.

-v

The `-v' flag is used in indexing mode. It stands for _verbose_, and causes more information to be shown during the indexing process.

-t

The `-t' flag stands for _threads_. It applies to search mode. Normally, only the messages matching all the specified expressions are included in the _virtual folder_ that is built. With the `-t' flag, any message in the same thread as one of the matched messages will be included too. Note, the threading is based on processing the Message-ID, In-Reply-To and References headers in the messages. Some mailers don't generate these headers in a co-operative way and will cause problems with this threading support. (Outlook seems to be one culprit.)

-a

The `-a' flag stands for _augment_. It also applies to search mode. Normally, the first action of the search mode is to clear any existing message links from the virtual folder. With the `-a' flag, this step is suppressed. It allows the folder contents to be built up by matching with 2 or more diverse sets of match expressions.

This man page was written by Kevin M. Rosenberg <kmr@debian.org> since the upstream package did not include a man page.

The directory /usr/share/doc/mairix contains full documentation for the mairix package.