[spambayes-dev] Experimental SpamBayes build available

[Richie Hindle]

[Richie]
> Nice one!  Barring a few minor glitches (which I'll enter into the SF
> tracker when I get the chance) sb_tray worked like a charm for me.

[Mark]
> Great!  I didn't see any new items in the tracker though.  If they are
> trivial, just mail them to me.

Sorry Mark, Christmas has been pretty hectic.  8-)

Here are the notes I made.  Lots of these aren't anything to do with the
binary packaging, but I'll send the lot anyway.  If you need any more
detail, just ask:

I have Outlook, and the installer says "Outlook appears to be installed".
But I don't use Outlook, so I clear that checkbox, check the Server box,
and hit Next.  The I think, "Hang on, I might as well have a look at the
Outlook plugin" so I hit Back.  It now says "Outlook does not appear to be
installed".  A bit misleading.

At the end of the install I checked both "View welcome.html" and "View
proxy_readme".  Only welcome.html appeared.

I can launch many instances of sb_tray without complaint.

The ini file for the proxy appeared in "C:\Documents and
Settings\rjh\Application Data\SpamBayes\Proxy" as you'd expect, but the
database and cache directories appeared in "C:\Program
Files\SpamBayes\bin".  Then after restarting, another set of database and
cache directories appeared in "C:\Documents and Settings\rjh".  I guess
sb_tray writes them into the working directory, and the installer's
working directory is "C:\Program Files\SpamBayes\bin" when it launches
sb_tray for the first time.  Then when you start it from the Start menu,
the working directory is "C:\Documents and Settings\rjh".

If I right-click the tray icon and go "Stop spambayes", the icon goes red
after a second or two and the proxy stops.  When I go right-click / Start,
the proxy doesn't start, and the icon still shows red.  If I move the
cursor over the icon - without clicking - it goes green, but the proxy
still hasn't started.  Right-clicking presents a "Stop" command, which
makes the icon go red again, but as soon as I move the cursor over the
icon it returns to green.  I have to exit and restart before the proxy
will restart.  I'd question whether we need the Stop/Start command - why
would I want the tray icon to stay there but the application to not run?
Stop vs. Exit is not a clear distinction.  Things like firewalls and virus
scanners need this because they can be intrusive, but sb_tray is not
intrusive - if your email client is configured to use it then it must be
running for your email to work, and if your email client isn't configured
to use it then it has no effect.

After training through the web interface, the home page still says
"Database has no training information ..." even though the stats say
"Total emails trained: Spam: 3 Ham: 18".  Only after changing and saving
the configuration does it update to say "Database only has 18 good and 3
spam ..."  Then after subsequent training it still says "18 good and 3
spam".

Defaulting the "Maximum results" field in the Find pane to 1 seems wrong.
It made sense when all you could do was search for a message ID (because
they're unique) but if I'm searching for text, I'll want to see all the
hits.

The Find pane only looks in the unknown cache, so it won't find anything
once you've trained.  It ought to look in the ham and spam caches as well.

I deliberately induced a false positive (by training on a thousand spams
with no hams trained) then corrected it via the Review page, and the
statistics now say "1 being false negatives" (plural: ack!) and "0 being
false positives".  That's the wrong way round.

-- 
Richie Hindle
richie at entrian.com