Mairix is a tool for indexing and searching words in locally stored mail. It was written by Richard Curnow and is licensed under the GPL.
mairix.el
is an interface to the mairix search engine. It allows you to
call mairix with a search term, easily create searches based on the
currently displayed mail, save regularly used searches in your
.emacs for future use and lets you call mairix for updating the
database.
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Mairix is a tool for indexing and searching words in locally stored mail. It was written by Richard Curnow and is licensed under the GPL. Mairix comes with most popular GNU/Linux distributions, but it also runs under Windows (with Cygwin), macOS and Solaris. The website can be found at http://www.rpcurnow.force9.co.uk/mairix/index.html
Though mairix might not be as flexible as other search tools like swish++ or namazu, it has the prime advantage of being incredibly fast. On current systems, it can easily search through headers and message bodies of thousands and thousands of mails in well under a second. Building the database necessary for searching might take a minute or two, but only has to be done once fully. Afterwards, the updates are done incrementally and therefore are really fast, too. Additionally, mairix is very easy to set up.
Mairix presents the search results by either populating a virtual maildir/MH folder with symlinks which point to the “real” message files, or if mbox is used, it creates a new mbox file which contains copies of the found messages.
mairix.el
is an interface to the mairix search engine. It allows
you to call mairix with a search term, easily create searches based on
the currently displayed mail, save regularly used searches in your
.emacs for future use and lets you call mairix for updating the
database. It also lets you easily create search queries using graphical
widgets, similar to a customization buffer.
Currently, mairix.el
is only tested with mbox output together
with RMail, Gnus, or VM as the Emacs mail program. However, it should
also work with Maildir or MH, and it should be very easy to integrate
other Emacs mail programs into mairix.el
(see Extending mairix.el).
If you use Gnus with maildir or MH, you should really use the native
Gnus back end nnmairix
instead, since it is more tightly
integrated into Gnus and has more features.
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.
First, put mairix.el
in your Emacs search path and put
(require 'mairix)
into your .emacs file. Then, use
M-x customize-group RET mairix RET to set your
preferences for mairix.el. The most important items are Mairix
File Path, Mairix Search File and Mairix Mail Program.
The latter specifies which mail program should be used to display the
mairix search results. Currently, RMail, Gnus with mbox files, and VM
are supported. If you use Gnus with maildir or mh, use the native
Gnus back end nnmairix instead.
If you use another Emacs mail program which is not yet supported by mairix.el, it is pretty easy to integrate it. See Extending mairix.el, on how to integrate it into mairix.el.
Now you should be ready to go. See Using mairix.el, for the available commands.
There are currently no default key bindings for mairix.el, since those
should depend on the used mail program and I personally do not use
RMail, so I wouldn’t know which key bindings are reasonable. I hope some
day this will change and mairix.el
will come with some good
key bindings for the different mail programs. Feel free to send me your
suggestions. Until then, define some bindings yourself. Here’s a quick
and dirty solution with global key definitions I currently use, which
might or might not collide with some other modes. Simply include them
in your .emacs and adapt to your needs:
(global-set-key (kbd "C-c C-o m") 'mairix-search) (global-set-key (kbd "C-c C-o w") 'mairix-widget-search) (global-set-key (kbd "C-c C-o u") 'mairix-update-database) (global-set-key (kbd "C-c C-o f") 'mairix-search-from-this-article) (global-set-key (kbd "C-c C-o t") 'mairix-search-thread-this-article) (global-set-key (kbd "C-c C-o b") 'mairix-widget-search-based-on-article) (global-set-key (kbd "C-c C-o s") 'mairix-save-search) (global-set-key (kbd "C-c C-o i") 'mairix-use-saved-search) (global-set-key (kbd "C-c C-o e") 'mairix-edit-saved-searches)
Here’s a description of the available interactive functions:
mairix-search
¶Call mairix with a search query. You will also be asked if you want to
include whole threads. The results are saved by mairix in the default
mail file, which is set through the variable mairix-search-file
, which
again is prefixed by mairix-file-path
. The results will then be
displayed with the chosen mail program. The command used to call mairix
is specified by the variable mairix-command
, together with the options
mairix-search-options
. The latter has the default -F
for making searching faster.
mairix-widget-search
¶Creates a mairix query using graphical widgets. Very handy if you’re
not (yet) familiar with the mairix search syntax. Just call it to see
how it works. You can then directly call mairix with the search term or
save it for future use. Since mairix allows almost arbitrary
combinations of search commands (like “tc” for “to or cc”), you
might want to include some other fields. This can be easily done by
modifying mairix-widget-fields-list
.
mairix-widget-search-based-on-article
¶Create a mairix query using graphical widgets, but based on the currently displayed article, i.e., the available fields will be filled with the current header values.
mairix-search-from-this-article
¶Search messages from sender of the current article. This is effectively
a shortcut for calling mairix-search
with f:current_from
.
If used with a prefix, include whole threads of the found messages.
mairix-search-thread-this-article
¶Search thread for the current article. This is effectively a shortcut
for calling mairix-search
with m:msgid
of the current article and
enabled threads.
mairix-save-search
¶Save the last search for future use. You will have to specify a name
for the search and will then be asked if you want to save your saved
searches in your .emacs. If you answer with yes, the variable
mairix-saved-searches
will be saved in the customize section of
your .emacs. You can also do this later by using
mairix-edit-saved-searches
.
mairix-use-saved-search
¶Call mairix with a previously saved search. You will be asked for the name of the saved search (use TAB for completion).
mairix-edit-saved-searches
¶Edit your current mairix searches. This is a simple major mode for
editing the contents of the variable mairix-saved-searches
. You
can edit and delete searches and save them in your .emacs. You
can also use this mode to call mairix with one of the saved searches.
Additionally, you can specify a file name for mairix to use for a
certain search instead of the default one. This is useful if you want
to open different searches at the same time, or if you want to regularly
access certain searches without the need to call mairix.
mairix-edit-saved-searches-customize
¶Edit the variable mairix-saved-searches
in a normal customization
buffer. This function exists more or less for historic reasons, but
maybe you like it.
mairix-update-database
¶Call mairix to update the database. Mairix will be called with the
options mairix-update-options
; the default is -F and
-Q to
make updates as fast as possible. Note that by using these options,
absolutely no integrity checking is done. If your database somehow gets
corrupted, simply delete it and update. If mairix-synchronous-update
is nil
(the default), mairix will be called in a subprocess so Emacs
will still be usable while the update is done.
Your favorite Emacs mail program is not supported? Shame on me. But it is really easy to integrate other mail programs into mairix.el. Just do the following:
Write a function that displays the mairix search results. This function
will be called from mairix.el
with the mail file/folder as the
single argument. For example, the function mairix-rmail-display
is currently used for RMail and mairix-gnus-ephemeral-nndoc
is
used for Gnus.
Write a function that retrieves a header from the currently active mail.
The single argument for this function is a string with the header name.
For examples, see mairix-rmail-fetch-field
and
mairix-gnus-fetch-field
for RMail and Gnus, respectively.
Add your mail program to the defcustom of mairix-mail-program
.
Then add the functions to mairix-display-functions
and
mairix-get-mail-header-functions
.
...so that I can eventually integrate it into future versions of mairix.el.
And that’s it!
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