[Spambayes] InBoxer/SpamAtBay beta available.

[Sean True]

It's been a long time since I posted availability of a new beta. This makes
the list
of changes quite long.

========
Historical notes.

InBoxer (SpamAtBay for those with a long memory) is a commercial spam 
filter for Outlook 2000+, based on the Spambayes project, extended with bug
fixes, functionality, documentation, and support. We share occasional ideas
and even more occasional code with Mark Hammond.

I wrote the first, really, really bad integration with
Outlook, using VBA and a Python COM server. Mark Hammond thought the idea
was neat, but that the execution was, err, flawed, and pretty much rewrote
it from scratch. Over the last few months, I've had a team of several people
working on polishing, layout, docs, QA, and (gag) marketing oriented
features. The current SB for Outlook and InBoxer/SpamAtBay forked last May,
although InBoxer/SAB use the current Spambayes engine.

We're still focusing on Tim's "easy enough for my sister" metric.
===========

If you are a developer (code, docs, frequent question-on-the-list answerer,
etc) you can ask me for an activation code, and get one.

You can download from http://pad.in-boxer.com/InBoxerSetupBeta1.1.31.zip


The core features for release 1.2 are stability and speed of operation. In
addition, there are several improvements in the user interface and in
overall functionality.

User interface improvements.

1) Preference and Advanced Preference dialogs have been added. This makes it
much easier to configure Inboxer behavior. The preferences dialog on main
menu has settings for mark spam as read, show system tray icon, and
automatic deletion of old spam. The Advanced preferences menu on advanced
menu has settings for automatic folder repair, and for controlling the
timings for the message filtering scheduler.

2) The overall menu structure has been rearranged for ease of use.

3) The post install checkup wizard has been extended by one screen.

4) The dialog that nags the user to activate the product during startup is
now less annoying.

5) Inboxer now watches the incoming mail for a valid activation message, and
if it arrives automatically activates the product. A pop-up dialog
acknowledges activation.

6) A menu item was added to manually delete block messages older than a
given number of days, which can be set in the preferences dialog on the main
menu.

7) A menu item to manually save the current configuration and statistics was
added to the advanced menu.

8) Lists of trusted and blocked addresses can now be exported, imported, and
merged. File formats include Excel spreadsheet (CSV format) and text (txt)
files.

9) A menu item was added to the statistics menu to allow the user to balance
the database statistics (creating equal number of good and spam messages),
which can improve performance if the ratio of good messages to spam messages
is very large or very small, at the cost of reducing some of the information
in the database. Balancing the database also makes it smaller, which can
improve runtime performance.

10) The user plug-in architecture has been extended to include dialog
capability, and an example plug-in which displays long term performance
statistics is available for download.

11) Help -> Check for updates logs into our customer support site, notes
your current version,
and tells you what your preferred upgrade path would be. This will let us
suggest specific upgrades
for specific versions of InBoxer.

12) Help -> Troubleshooting logs into our customer support site, also notes
your current version,
and then analyzes uploaded configuration and performance information to make
suggestions. By putting the troubleshooting code on the web page, we can
improve it for everyone without needing 
to upgrade the installed version of InBoxer.

Improvements to speed.

Version 1.2 is built using Python 2.3.2, and the psyco optimizing compiler.
Additional tuning has also improved initial loading speed.

Improvements to stability.

A number of significant problems were addressed in this release:

1) Outlook now shuts down more cleanly and more quickly.

2) The install program now automatically uninstalls the program files for
the previous version, while leaving the statistics in configuration files in
place.

3) The toolbar buttons are now placed in their own standalone toolbar, which
can be customized independently of the main Outlook toolbar.

4) Hotmail folders are not properly supported under Outlook 2003

5) A repair and support option was added to the program start menu, which
addresses the most common load failures encountered with the add-in. This
information is included in the technical support e-mail which is created
automatically.

6) Version 1.1 had several issues with the toolbar customization dialog, and
with abbreviations and short cuts in Outlook when entered after using one of
the file dialogs, or one of the folder tree dialogs. The code which cause
the conflict and the resulting issues has been removed.

7) Version 1.1 failed if the user unintentionally (or intentionally) remove
the blocked or review folders without replacing and reconfiguring them.
Missing folders can now be automatically repaired and reconfigured, and this
behavior is controlled by an option on the advanced preferences dialog.

8) Version 1.1 was somewhat unstable under Windows 98, and these problems
are addressed in this release.

9) Express set up now checks to make sure that the inbox contains a minimala
mount of spam before building the statistics database. If there is access
spam the inbox, express set up stops, and asks the user to clean the inbox
first.

10) Entering an activation code now immediately enables the user interface
in an expired trial version.

11) The user can enter the trial period lowercase that entering a valid
e-mail address.

12) Express set up checks to see whether the ratio of spam to good messages
is great than 2: 1 or less than 1: 2, and automatically balances the
statistics if the ratio is out of range. This prevents an excess number of
messages in the unsure category (placed in the review folder).

13) A number of issues with the sender list (trust/block by email address or
domain) have been fixed.

Like all beta software, use of this version incurs some risk. We believe
that risk to be very small.

Thanks again for your help.

-- Sean

Sean True
Chief Technologist
Audiotrieve, LLC.