Tony, Dreas,

> OTOH, the SpamExperts guys have indicated that they intend to contribute
> back code to SpamBayes, so maybe a LSP-enabled SpamBayes may turn up in the
> future.

I did once investigate the LSP approach for Spambayes, but I gave up because the
LSP system has a fatal flaw.  Each LSP is required to contain many hundreds of
lines of boilerplate code, which Microsoft ships as a sample.  To write an LSP,
you modify their sample.  But older versions of the sample were buggy with
respect to chaining on to other LSPs.  There are products in the wild that are
based on those buggy samples, and even a perfect LSP won't work if it gets
installed onto a machine with one these buggy LSPs on it.  The buggy LSP works
perfectly as long as it's the only non-Microsoft LSP on the system.  Users will
inevitably blame the new LSP rather than the old one when things break.

I wish I knew the extent of the problem, or could name some of these buggy
programs, or could give you an official reference, but all I remember is that I
found this out and gave up on the idea.

I believe that a lot of network-hooking applications tend to use other
techniques (API hooking or network drivers) than LSPs.  I don't have any
evidence to back that up - it's a gut feeling derived from reading around the
subject.

(Dreas, sorry if this is bad news - I didn't know you were considering LSPs.  It
may be that these days the problem is negligible - it was a couple of years ago
that I looked at this.)

-- 
Richie Hindle
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

_______________________________________________
[email protected]
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/spambayes
Check the FAQ before asking: http://spambayes.sf.net/faq.html

Reply via email to