[Spambayes] Outlook Express tray icon disappeared

[Tony Meyer]

> I looked for the SpamBayesServer1.log to no avail.
> (If someone could point me in the right direction,
> I'd be much obliged.)

The new release includes a troubleshooting guide for sb_server which doesn't
have much in it, but does have this.  A shortcut to it is installed in your
Start menu (under SpamBayes).

> Unfortunately, the tray icon was still red and still
> disappeared when I moused over it.  So I looked at the
> files in the Application Data folder, and in the
> bayescustomize.ini, I noticed that persistent_use_database
> was set to pickle, which I had selected when I was
> playing around with settings right before spambayes 
> stopped functioning.  I changed it back to dbm in the
> .ini file, and now it works again.  Though not very
> scientific in nature, I perhaps discovered that if one
> changes the persistent_use_database to pickle, then stops
> spambayes, it screws up the program and makes the icon
> dodgy.

I suspect that if you do find the log file, it'll have something like this
in it:

"""
  File "c:\spambayes\spambayes\storage.py", line 113, in load
    tempbayes = pickle.load(fp)

EOFError
"""

The problem (*a* problem at least, and I suspect the one here) is that when
you change to/from dbm from/to pickle, the existing database is still there
and is the wrong type.  When you try to start SpamBayes again, it fails
because the database type is incorrect.  This is a known problem, and has
been for a while.  The nice solution would be that if you did this via the
web interface a new page should open pointing out the problem and offering
to (a) delete the database to start from scratch, or (b) use sb_dbexpimp.py
to convert the database to the new format.  No-one's managed to get around
to doing this, though.

> Anyway, I'm back on track and off pickles for awhile.

Good to hear :)  Be sure to let us know if anything else goes wrong.

=Tony Meyer

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