[spambayes-dev] Spontaneous training in Outlook addin?

[Mark Hammond]

> [Tim describes some oddities, Mark Hammond thinks hard]
>
> I'm afraid I can't make time to help now.  I switched to
> bsddb3 in the hopes
> I could provoke a corrupt database, or one of the infamous
> assertion errors,
> since I've had more luck than most in fixing stuff like that.

I am yet to see an assertion error.  I *suspect* that it was the result of
the database only being saved at shutdown time.  Since incremental training
I am yet to hear a report on this.  Note that with incremental
training/bsddb, the database is *never* saved at shutdown - we check, but it
is never dirty!  This makes it far less likely the machine will shutdown
during our db write.

Note, however, that the Outlook addin specifically traps this AssertionError
[manager.py/score()] and reports the error to the user.  It tells them the
database is corrupt and needs to be retrained (whereas before, SpamBayes
just appeared to stop working for no reason)

So it is unclear if the error has truly stopped, or people are silently
re-training from scratch.

Maybe I should change the text to indicate we would appreciate a quick mail
to spambayes-dev at python.org indicating they saw the error?  I'm inclined to
believe that it is rarely seen though.

>  So I've been
> paying detailed attention to everything the addin does.

If you really want to see everything, set [General]/verbose=9 :)

> Mentioning copies may be important to the next one:  because I keep my
> training ham in a folder dedicated to that, sometimes I drag
> a copy of a ham
> message into that folder.  So it's possible that I also (but
> rarely) end up
> saving the original there too, or even put more than one copy into it.

Yes, I am inclined to believe that is true for my examples too.  I keep a
copy of "good mail, but looks spammy" in a discrete folder, and sometimes
these are moved, sometimes they are copied from my Inbox.  I am about to
check in a sandbox tool to prove (or not) this.

Mark.