[Spambayes] offer of assistance

[Tim Peters]

[Pete]
> I will set aside a minimum of 30 minutes per day to work with the bug
> reports.

Well, we usually demand a minimum of 10x that much, but since you're just
starting I guess that will do <wink>.

> I have a PC that needs an OS, so pick one (I have all MS and a few
> versions of Linux, but I am in Linux Newbie stage) and that's what I
> will work off of.  It's a 180 gig HDD, so I can Set up a multi boot
> system to test several flavors if you wish. Just send me the order
> and I will fill it. :-)

I suppose it depends on which systems generate the most "mysterious" bug
reports.  I'm not sure, but I think that, as with all things Microsoft, the
worst puzzlers have come from the most recent versions of the OS and of
Outlook.  I've never had a lick of trouble with the Outlook addin under 3
different OL2K installations, two on different Win98SE boxes and one on
Win2K Pro -- not even in the very earliest pre-alpha versions of the addin.

So most bug reports leave me going "eh?", and we get an endless string of
bug reports about things the developers have never seen, users can't figure
out, and most users on "similar" systems never see either.  We're just using
the documented Outlook and MAPI APIs here.  They're severely
under-documented (not to mention wrongly and not-at-all documented) at the
level we need to work, so a lot of it's poke-and-hope -- trying to interface
with Outlook is a pretty miserable collection of fuzzy tasks.

Other weaknesses on our Outlook team (nice euphemism <wink>) are that I
expect we all run an English/American OS and an English/American Outlook;
all run in IMO (Internet Mail Only configuration, for those Outlooks that
have more than one); don't get anywhere near an Exchange server (e.g., all
my email comes from a variety of POP3 accounts); and use few other addins (I
happen to use Outlook QuoteFix, but that's all).

Some of those may, or may not, play a role in the stubborn bug reports.  If
you want it, it can be your job to help figure out which, why and where.