[Spambayes] filtering question

[Tim Peters]

[Michael Sadkin]
> When I start Outlook for the 1st time, the incoming mail is not always
> filtered.  If I shut down Outlook and reopen it, the mail is then
> filtered. Why does this happen"

The mail is filtered when you reopen Outlook because the first thing
SpamBayes does is look for messages in your watched folders that haven't
been processed yet.

I don't think we'll ever know why SpamBayes can miss some messages in a
batch of incoming mail.  SpamBayes relies on Outlook to tell it about new
messages, and sometimes Outlook simply doesn't.  Only the people who wrote
Outlook might be able to explain why not.  From experience, it appears that
Outlook sometimes skips telling SpamBayes about new messages when the load
on the system is high.  When you first open Outlook and a whole bunch of new
messages come in at once-- and especially if you have a high-speed
connection, a slow machine, too little RAM, and/or are running other
programs simultaneously --Outlook is seemingly too busy retrieving them to
bother talking to addins about each new message it gets.

Something that should help is enabling the addin's "background" processing,
via SpamBayes -> SpamBayes Manager ... -> Advanced -> Enable background
filtering.  That makes SpamBayes "sleep" a lot, thus reducing the peak load
on an overburdened system, and letting Outlook hog more of the machine's
resources when Outlook is struggling to keep up with the incoming load.