The State of ThunderBayes
First, let me say that I am very sorry for neglecting this space for so long. I’ve been busy with real life and some other projects that will may show up here sometime in the future.
Yes, I’m mostly ignoring the comments on the ThunderBayes posts these days due to a lack of time to even do everything I want to do, let alone what other people want me to do. To be truthful, I don’t even use ThunderBayes anymore because all of my email accounts have been switched to gmail and the spam filtering there is Good Enough for now. That is not to say that ThunderBayes did not work for me when I did use it (it did everything I wanted it to do, and even did a good job at that). However, ThunderBayes is a bit of a kludge and certain parts of it need to be rewritten to be more usable by the average, non-hacker user. Unfortunately I do not have the time nor the will to fix it at this point. If someone else wants to pick up the project I’d be willing to talk (email me).
I do hope some people can still get some use out of the add-on, but at this point I am declaring it unsupported by me. Maybe I will find time sometime in the future to do more work on it, but don’t hold your breath. Others are free to share their solutions to problems of course. Ideally a forum should be setup somewhere because blog comments are not a good place have support discussions, so please refrain from doing that here. Does the Mozilla add-ons site have any type of forum or Q/A section for the community to provide support?
To those of you who are still brave enough to try it out, I would encourage you to first try the default setup with the internal SpamBayes filter. If that does not work, try installing and configuring SpamBayes separately and use the ThunderBayes Add-On options to make ThunderBayes talk to that manually installed copy of SpamBayes. I know that sounds ugly, but it might help some people to continue to use the extension even if it has a few flaws. (Most of the recent problems have been related to the internal SpamBayes config.)
With sincere regrets for not being able to answer every question and fix every problem related to ThunderBayes, I wish everyone who tries it out all the best.
Daniel
Thanks for the update, shame you are too busy to support it. I’d support it, but I am too busy also :). I might have some time this summer to try at least to set up a support forum elsewhere, as you note, blog comments are not the right place.
Thunderbayes still works great for me, but I expect it will break sometime in the future.
I do very much appreciate the work you put into this and will keep an eye on your blog here for any future projects.
Malcolm