[Spambayes] Outlook add-in misfeature

[Coe, Bob]

R. K. Coe

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Here's something I noticed the other day. Consider an Outlook add-in user whose Windows profile has been configured for Spambayes. Up through about version .06, if that user opened Outlook on a computer on which Spambayes was installed, he'd see the appropriate toolbar and menu items; but if he opened Outlook on a non-Spambayes computer, he'd see no evidence of Spambayes: no toolbar and no options. I think that's pretty much how it should work.

But it turns out that in version .081, a Spambayes-enabled user on a non-Spambayes computer does see the toolbar (which is, of course, non-functional, since the Spambayes executables aren't there). In other words, the presence of the toolbar follows the user, regardless of the computer's configuration. I think this is confusing and definitely not a step in the right direction. Intuitively, I think I understand the forces at work here: the developers tried (with at least partial success) to come up with a less clumsy installation procedure to deal with the tide of "I installed Spambayes but it doesn't work" complaints. But in any complex software package it's important to find the right partition between user-specific and computer-specific functionality. In this case, the toolbar should be visible only if it's active. Which means, I think, only if both the user and the computer are properly configured for Spambayes.

Bob <mailto:rcoe at CambridgeMA.GOV>  

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