[Spambayes] Incoming email alerts...

[Tim Peters]

[Berson, Brad]
> ...
> The documented problem of not being able to squash the incoming
> email notification when an email is routed to the junk e-mail
> folder is something that interests me because of the frequency of
> the junk coming in, sometimes close to 100 a day.
>
> There's a product called Qurb which according to what I've read,
> may have gotten around this obstacle somehow.  I have not evaluated
> it because whitelist solutions do not interest me.  Just thought
> you folks might want to check that out.

Ya, I think the real problem here is that the SpamBayes developers get so
much email that none will ever really care about that systray icon.  I know
I don't -- it's on all day and all night for me, and would be even if spam
didn't trigger it.  So there's just no motivation for the current developers
to spend their free time trying to endure whatever convolutions are
necessary (and it must be convoluted, since Outlook doesn't expose that
systray gimmick directly).

That's one way in which a commercial product *can* be better:  if enough
customers offer to pay for a feature, management can pay a developer to
implement it on work time.

In the Open Source world, the theory is that a *user* who wants something
enough will volunteer to do the work themself, and contribute the code back
to the project for everyone to use. Since that's the only theory we have
<wink>, that's the only way it will get done.  So far nobody has
volunteered.

One note of caution:  reverse-engineering commercial products is almost
always a violation of the license agreement, so if someone does want to do
this, do *not* purchase Qurb and crack how they do it.  Any sign of stuff
like that in contributed code, and it will be rejected -- that can create
legal problems for the whole project.  Since SpamBayes doesn't generate any
revenue, it doesn't have any funds to pay lawyers either.