[Spambayes] simpler way to invoke SpamBayes from Outlook rule

[Richie Hindle]

[Seth]
> I just noticed there is a standard action for Outlook rules called
> "start application", which runs a user-specified application.  Thus,
> we could easily make a rule to run the SpamBayes message processor
> when any new message arrives.

[Tim]
> I'm sorry to say that this one is simply impractical:  process creation is
> an extremely expensive undertaking on Windows, and especially on the older
> Win9x/ME flavors.

Would that still be true for a very small C program that talked to a
long-running Spambayes server process?  I know that process startup is
incredibly bad on Windows compared with any sensible OS, but that's a
relative measure.  I just started Notepad for the first time in ages and
it took on the order of a quarter of a second (on my fast machine, but
people do run Outlook on fast machines 8-).   Doing it a second time is
close to instantateous.  Maybe doing it a thousand times would be
significant, but it's still relative to the time taken to fetch, classify,
sort and store a thousand emails.

-- 
Richie Hindle
richie at entrian.com