[Spambayes] Outlook plug-in - when *exactly* does the message get changed?

[Jon Skeet]

Hi,

I'm afraid my question is relatively detailed - not the kind of thing which is likely to make it into a FAQ. The heart of it is that I'm running the SpamBayes Outlook plug-in, and I need to know what triggers SpamBayes to run. Here's the more detailed picture:

o We have an Exchange server running, and everyone uses Outlook
o We also have a notification server. This polls the server using IMAP4 once every 10 minutes. It looks for unread messages with a UID higher than it's seen before, and sends a summary SMS to people based on this. When it reads a message, it then marks it as unread again so as not to interfere with normal client operation.
o We're running the SpamBayes Outlook plug-in on many of the clients

We've noticed we've started getting duplicate notifications - ie the notification server is noticing the message twice, eg once at 3.15 and then again at 3.25. The reason for this is that when SpamBayes marks the message with a spam percentage, its UID changes - so we see it as new again.

We had expected that SpamBayes would mark the message as soon as it came in, which would mean the window where the notification server could see it before it had been marked by SpamBayes would be very short - but it seems this doesn't happen. It's almost as if a message is marked when the *next* message arrives, or something similar. Given that various things (like poking the IMAP server or refreshing Outlook) could trigger SpamBayes, we're in a sort of quantum situation - we can't diagnose what's going on without possibly screwing up the results. Some more definitive information would be very much appreciated!

Many thanks for your time (and for SpamBayes itself!),
Jon Skeet