[Spambayes] Email client integration -- what's needed?

[Tim Peters]

[Tim@mail.powweb.com]
> The Notes market will be a bit more difficult to
> reach, because as a product it is even more closed than
> Outlook... (imagine that...)

[Mark Hammond]
> I find that a strange comment given the integration already achieved
> with Outlook.  From an extensibility point-of-view, Outlook is almost
> as open as I can imagine.

Indeed, that's part of the *problem* with Outlook, isn't it?  There are so
many different ways to hook into it (the Outlook object model, the MAPI
substrate, the Collaboration Data Objects layer, ...) I can't even hold them
all in my head, and it's never clear which of seemingly dozens of ways to
get a thing done may actually work.  It's the very definition of
poke-and-hope programming.

I did some Notes programming in a previous life, and hope never to do so
again.  That was more a matter of wading through seemingly dozens of ways
*not* to get a thing done, hoping to paste enough failure modes together so
that the end result almost appeared to work some of the time.  BTW, Notes
was the purest example of a whole being greater than the sum of its parts
I've ever seen:  each piece (from email to database) sucked, but the whole
was nevertheless very useful for workgroup collaboration.