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Installation instructions

mod_mbox is very easy to install and setup. First, we need to build the module and make the Apache HTTPd webserver load it. Then, we'll setup our archives repository and complete Apache's configuration.

mod_mbox has, of course, some requirements :

Download and build

You can download a source tarball or checkout sources via Subversion : 

    svn checkout https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/httpd/mod_mbox/trunk
    mod_mbox
Then, build mod_mbox : 
   ./autogen.sh
   ./configure --enable-experimental-libtool --with-apxs=which apxs
    make clean all
    su -c 'make install'
Refer to the configure help ( ./configure --help ) if you need a to specify an installation prefix ( --prefix=... ) or any other specific setup.

Preliminary Apache setup

The next step is to make Apache HTTPd load the mod_mbox module at runtime. Edit your Apache configuration file, and add the following to the rest of the LoadModule lines : 

    LoadModule mbox_module /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_mbox.so

Repository setup

mod_mbox is a mail archive browser. Having mail archives to browse would be a good idea. For the following steps, we'll assume that you have a directory (let's call it foo ) with your .mbox files. You must have a .mbox file per month and each of them must be named in a YYYYMM.mbox manner.

mod_mbox needs a static preprocessing of the archives before being able to run. For that, we'll use the tool mod-mbox-util that was compiled with the module itself at build time : 

    mod-mbox-util -v -c foo/
Don't forget to run mod-mbox-util each time you update your .mbox files !

If you haven't done so yet, you must move your archives to a directory in your Apache's DocumentRoot (or create a symbolic link to your directory in it) : 

    mkdir -p ~www-data/archives
    mv foo/ $
    cp mod_mbox/docroot/* $
    chown -R www-data:www-data $_
You can host multiple mailing list archives with mod_mbox , each stored in a separate directory. If you are doing so, you should consider adding an index file, displaying a list of all hosted archives.

mod_mbox configuration

The last thing you need to do in order to get your mod_mbox up and running is to configure Apache so that it will call mod_mbox when trying to read a .mbox file. The following configuration snippet is a good start : 

    AddHandler mbox-handler.mbox
    <LocationMatch /archives/([^/]+)>
    MboxIndex On
    MboxRootPath "/archives/"
    MboxStyle "/archives/style.css"
    MboxScript "/archives/archives.js"
    MboxHideEmpty On
    MboxAntispam On
    </LocationMatch>
Please refer to the configuration directives reference for more information on these directives.