[Spambayes] Mulitple SpamBayes installs on a network

[Ryan Malayter]

From: Mark Hammond [mailto:mhammond at skippinet.com.au] 

> Another option may be to see if we 
> can use MAPI itself as our database!

My understanding from TechEd 2003 conference sessions, as well as
various other articles about Exchange 2003, is that Microsoft may
deprecate MAPI-RPC in favor of an HTTP/XML/SOAP based interface to
Exchange server. It's already in Exchange/Outlook 2003 as "cached mode",
and supposedly works much better than the MAPI-RPC stuff in an
intermittently connected environment. 

I suppose you could save a pickle or BSD-DB image onto a custom MAPI
form, and then load it and run everything from memory or temp files on
the client. That would also be fast, I think, but I'm not sure how
concurrent updates to the DB would work.

Of course, MS might keep the MAPI interface in the client code, and just
change the server access protocols from RPC to HTTP. Who knows. Whatever
the state of MAPI, I think using a high-performance, multi-user DB
engine is probably the cleanest move. What about supporting MySQL, or
ODBC/OLEDB-compliant data sources? Most Outlook 2000+ users will have a
license and the binaries for MSDE on their client as part of MS Office.

But then again, using full-blown RDBMS with replication might be using a
sledge-hammer on a thumbtack. How complex do you want this database code
to get?

	-ryan-