Indexing Mail

This documentation is somewhat old and out of date.

Mailpile will create and use a folder in your home directory named .mailpile for its indexes and settings.

A simple test run might look like so:

$ ./mp --add /var/spool/mail/YOURNAME --rescan all

The program prints details of its progress as it runs. Note that just opening the mailbox may take a while if it is large enough (it takes about a bit over a minute to open my 500MB mailbox). Once the mailbox has been opened, a somewhat average computer (e.g. a 1.66Ghz Intel Atom with a 5400rpm HDD) running Mailpile can index roughly four messages per second, so if you are processing thousands of messages you should expect it to take a few hours.

You can repeat the add command to specify multiple mailboxes. Boxes can be in mailbox or maildir format. Boxes are not recursive, though. If you have many maildirs in a tree, you must specify each one individually.

Stopping the program with CTRL-C is (relatively) nondestructive - it will try to save its progress and re-running should continue the scan from where it left off.