[Spambayes] SpamBayes not catching spam in mail sorted by InboxRules?

[Tim Peters]

[Dennis McCunney]
> ...
> When does SpamBayes actually look at the mail to classify it?  A couple
> of lists I'm on are prone to spam, and the spam seems to get through.  It
> *looks* like the Inbox rule is putting the mail in the list folder
> *before* SpamBayes has a chance to detect that it's spam and move it to
> the Junk folder.

That's usually true.  SpamBayes scores a piece of email when Outlook decides
to tell SpamBayes that new email has arrived, and, unfortunately, it may do
that before running its own rules, after running them, both before and
after, or not at all.  Tell it to Microsoft <wink>.  It's most likely that
Outlook will run its own rules first, and you can make that *extremely*
likely by enabling the SpamBayes "background filtering" option.  It doesn't
appear possible to convince Outlook to run Spambayes first, at least not
with our current approach (or with any other realistic approach investigated
to date).

Note that you can tell SpamBayes to watch any number of folders, not just
the Inbox.  That's how I filter spam from the folders my Rules move things
into.  Someone recently reported horrible problems when trying that with
(hard to say) about 1,000 different folders, spread across multiple .pst
files, but nobody has reported problems with non-extreme use.

> I could be wrong about that (and probably am),

Nope!  Sometimes appearances aren't deceiving <wink>.

> but I am curious.  A quick glance at the FAQ didn't reveal an answer.
> Apologies if it was there and I just didn't see it: I'm one of those
> folks who *does* RTFM. :)

That's appreciated.  Want to be one of those folks who WTFM?  I think we
could benefit by explaining what's known about the excruciating interactions
between SB and Rules in a comprehensible way.