[Spambayes] Leaving for another tool.

[skip at pobox.com]

    Thomas> This only proves that Spambayes needs an autobalancing ham/spam
    Thomas> feature built in by default.  Users train on everything in the
    Thomas> hopes of eliminating all spam from the in-box.  Also, by _your_
    Thomas> logic, the default training mechanism in Spambayes should be to
    Thomas> NOT train on spam.
    Thomas>   VERY counter-intuitive.

SpamBayes consists of several different applications.  Each application is
responsible for its training policy.  When the software was first developed
it wasn't clear what training policies would be best.  Consequently, it's
been left up to the users to decide how they want to train.  Time and time
again people post to this list that training on mistakes and unsures works
well for them.  If you'd like to codify that as a policy, as they say,
"patches are welcome".  Personally, I don't use Windows as all, so I'm
unable to help you with the Outlook plug-in.  The other developers who have
Windows experience don't have the time to work on SpamBayes these days.

    Thomas> In terms of usability, Spambayes is clearly designed "by geeks,
    Thomas> for geeks" but since this tool has appeared in major computing
    Thomas> magazines that _users_ read, the tool needs to change to fit the
    Thomas> mindset of those who will actually use the product.  

That's fine, but I think we need some new geeks to step up and implement
these features.  Alternatively, you can contact companies like InBoxer who
have a commercial product that uses SpamBayes under the covers.  Perhaps
they have implemented the training features you desire.  Note that nobody
has ever submitted SpamBayes for inclusion in magazines.  Those magazines
just learn about it, test it and present the results to their readers.

    Thomas> Maybe your goal is only to cater to geeks.  

No, you seem to think there's a company back here selling and supporting a
product.  Nothing could be farther from the truth.  Yes, those of us who
have developed parts of SpamBayes can probably be classified as geeks (see
the attached photo I took this morning), but it's more important to
understand that SpamBayes was developed to solve our needs.  We were just
scratching what itched.

    Thomas> If that's the case, you need to state it somewhere at the top of
    Thomas> your homepage and drop the support for the Outlook add-in

I'm not sure where you got the idea that SpamBayes was supported in the
traditional commercial software sense of the word.

You are more than welcome to take SpamBayes and commercialize it as the
InBoxer folks did.  The license allows that.  I personally have no interest
in doing that though.  Someone else pays me well to write software that has
nothing to do with spam filtering.

-- 
Skip Montanaro - skip at pobox.com - http://www.webfast.com/~skip/
A geek since well before 1998

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