[spambayes-dev] Python programming for outlook plugins & spambayesuninstall

[Leon Oosterwijk]

Mark (and Tony), 

Thank you for your feedback. I've been doing some reading and tinkering.
I noticed that the "unregister" does not remove the tool bars. With
version 10a4 I was not able to re-register the source version and make
it all work. I downloaded 10a5. This version did work, but only after
adding all the missing files to the outlook2000\dialogs\resources
directory and making changes to msgstore.py (for some reason errored on:
folder_eid, ret_class = store.GetReceiveFolder(msg_class, 0) ) perhaps
because my folder names are dutch. 

While doing all the research on outlook automation it struck me that
there are a lot of incompatible ways of interacting with the different
outlook versions. Spambayes was the first program I found that seemed to
handle all versions of outlook while not needing tons of tedious code.
My compliments to you. 

I noticed while messing with the dialogs.h/dialogs.rc files that you
seem to import these from visual studio. I assume you do some of your
interface design in this program and then convert this over somehow. Do
you have more information on this? 

There are a lot of programs that do server-side spam filtering, and also
a lot that do client side spam filtering (like spambayes). The only
product I know that neatly ties them together is cloudmark. They went
paid I believe and I wasn't too impressed when I used their application
last year. 

Spam filtering seemed like a neat topic, but the implementation of a
working trust-metric system is going to be the meat of the academic
merit this project has. As far as I know there are only a handful trust
metric systems publicly in deployment on the internet right now. 

Thank you. 

Leon


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mark Hammond [mailto:mhammond at skippinet.com.au] 
> Sent: Thursday, September 11, 2003 12:29 AM
> To: 'Leon Oosterwijk'; spambayes-dev at python.org
> Subject: RE: [spambayes-dev] Python programming for outlook 
> plugins & spambayesuninstall
> 
> 
> > I installed spambayes from source. It created the plugin just fine.
> > However, there is now way to remove the plugin. Can anyone shed some
> > light on this.
> 
> Run "addin.py --unregister".  Note that the toolbar items are 
> not removed -
> we don't really know how to do that at uninstall time.
> 
> > 2:
> > I'm planning to write my own spam filter. This filter will
> > also feature
> > a plugin to outlook. I'm rather new to programming plugins
> > for outlook.
> > Does anyone have any good reading they can recommend? I found some
> > reading which talks about using VB6. it seems you need CDO
> > and there are
> > tons of incompatibilities between the different versions of
> > outlook. It
> > seems python would be a cleaner way to go.
> 
> Nope - just the various samples all over the web.  Note that 
> using CDO will
> be a problem as newer outlooks will force the security 
> dialogs.  You need to
> either stick to the Outlook object model, or use extended 
> MAPI.  Note VB
> can't use extended MAPI, so a tool named "Redemption" is very 
> useful (but
> Python does support it, so we don't need that tool)
> 
> > The spam filter I'm trying to write is a thesis project that will
> > feature server-side or centralized spam filtering and a 
> mechanism for
> > users to report spam (for learning) by means of a network 
> where their
> > credentials are authorized by trust metrics (see raph
> > levien's work for
> > more details).
> 
> I think some systems like that already exist, but I assume 
> you have already
> found them :)
> 
> Mark.
>