[Spambayes] Improvement suggestion

[Tony Meyer]

> It would be great if somehow the filter could run before
> the "you've got mail" indications.

Unfortunately there isn't any known way to get SpamBayes to consistently run
before the Outlook rules.  The most consistent behaviour occurs if SpamBayes
runs after the Outlook rules, so this is what the "background filtering"
option (Advanced tab; on by default) does.  If you turn that off, then you
*might* have SpamBayes run before the Outlook rules, depending on the
details of your system.  You might find that who goes first arbitrarily
changes, or that Outlook always goes first anyway (particularly if the rules
are running on an Exchange server).

With the 1.1 release, you can get SpamBayes to move good mail (ham) to a
folder, like unsure and spam can be moved.  With this, you could simulate
the Outlook rules going second by having them process messages appearing in
this "ham" folder, rather than on any incoming mail.  However, neither the
envelope tray icon nor the new mail sound are triggered by Outlook rules,
AFAIK.  (Although you could, I believe, setup an Outlook rule to play a new
mail sound; AFAIK you can't interact with the tray icon).

> I.e. I would just assume
> not hear my little sound and get the envelope icon in the
> system tray when I get spam.

With 1.1 we have a potential solution to the sound part of this.  You can
turn off the Outlook new mail sound, and turn on notification sounds that
SpamBayes will play.  You can set separate sounds for ham, unsure, and spam
mail, or have no sound for each classification.  To do what you're after
(assuming that SpamBayes filters all mail), you could set a sound for ham
(and unsure, possibly), but not for spam.

If people like the new notifications feature, then it's likely that a
similar feature will be added for the tray icon (i.e. we will have our own
one).  There's a lot of information about why we don't just control the
existing one here:

<http://spambayes.org/faq.html#how-can-i-get-rid-of-the-envelope-tray-icon-f
or-spam>

An alpha release of 1.1 (1.1a1) is available at the moment (see
<http://spambayes.org/download>).  If you are comfortable with trying out
pre-release (experimental/testing) versions of software, then you could
download it and give it a go (you can always go back to 1.0.4 if necessary).
Otherwise, you'll have to wait until the final release of 1.1 is made (at
least a couple of months away).

=Tony.Meyer

-- 
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