[Spambayes] Spam Baes Question

[Coe, Bob]

Yes, even if it's replaced with keeping track by name. I think the Outlook plugin should behave just the way Outlook does; otherwise it causes more confusion than it eliminates. A high percentage of the difficulties I encounter with third-party software arise from the developers' failure to follow Windows' user interface paradigm, either because they were too lazy (or didn't understand it very well) or because they thought they had a better idea. In some cases, maybe they did have a better idea, but adherence to known standards is usually of more value to the user. The One Good Thing Bill Gates has done for the industry is to provide a set of interface standards that users can learn to recognize, but its value depends on developers actually following it.

The proposed change obviously reflects the rather high volume of "Why can't I find my spam folder?" queries. But these questions come mostly from newbies who didn't bother to read the FAQ, and they probably don't know Outlook very well either. Those users are going to be in trouble either way, and their problems with Spambayes may be dwarfed by other things they don't understand. If you follow the Windows standards, then the more a user learns about Outlook, the more (not less) sense the Spambayes implementation will make.

<soapbox-off>
Entirely aside from the above, it should be easier to go with the Outlook flow than to buck it. If you do go to keeping track by name, I'll bet you end up having to wring some subtle bugs out of the code.

Bob


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Tony Meyer [mailto:tameyer at ihug.co.nz]
> Sent: Wednesday, January 07, 2004 12:27 AM
> To: Coe, Bob; spambayes at Python.org
> Subject: RE: [Spambayes] Spam Baes Question
> 
> 
> > > Note that this may change in future versions, as apparently this 
> > > 'keeping track' behaviour is confusing <0.5 wink>.
> >
> > Confusing or not, I hope you don't change that.
> 
> Even if it's replaced with 'keeping track' by name, instead?  At the moment,
> if you delete your spam folder, then create a new one in the same place with
> the same name, Outlook and therefore SpamBayes know that it's not the same,
> and so SpamBayes doesn't use it.  Under the proposed new scheme, it would,
> because all it cared about was what the name was.  OTOH, if you renamed your
> spam folder, you'd have to change the SpamBayes settings to match.
> 
> It would be good to get more feedback about how people feel about this.
> It's certainly not going to be done by the next release, anyway.
> 
> =Tony Meyer