[Spambayes] Upgrade pointers please

[Tony Meyer]

> I suspect this has to do with three things: firstly the ratio of 
> ham/spam - which is currently running at around 4:1 measured over an 
> average of around 450-500 mail items per day,

SpamBayes' performance does definitely suffer with an imbalance.  It would
be well worth trying to correct that.  (You don't have to train on
everything, if that's what you're currently doing - the wiki
<http://entrian.com/sbwiki> has a *heap* of information about training
strategies).

> It's clearly time to upgrade so as to sort a few things out; however 
> I've managed to completely lose track of which version of w32all is 
> currently installed [yes it's on a W2K server] and I'm also 
> not at all  clear if I should consider upgrading Python at the same time.

I believe that the official party line is that there's absolutely no reason
to stick with Python 2.2 now that 2.3.3 is out (unless you're stuck with it
for some other reason).  Unless you're using the pop3proxy_service or
pop3proxy_tray scripts (or the Outlook plug-in), then win32all isn't used,
so that doesn't matter.  If you are, then it's always best to have the
latest, but I'm pretty sure that anything recent will suffice.

IIRC, 1.0a7 slipped out with a few scripts missing 2.2 compatibility, so
that's another reason to consider moving to 2.3.  (These have been fixed in
cvs by now).

> I'd welcome pointers to some URLs or other info offering guidance
> on the best procedure for proceeding with the upgrade.

It's well worth reading the release notes for 1.0a5, 1.0a6 and 1.0a7.  Each
of them has information about upgrading from the previous version, and any
steps that might be necessary.  It shouldn't be that difficult to figure out
what's relevant to a 1.0a4->1.0a7 upgrade.  You can read them via the (sf)
download page - just click on the release heading.

=Tony Meyer