Hi Richie, The LSP is actually quite a complicated thing indeed. Fortunately we have an LSP specialist that build it for us. We have one of those LSPs that is not buggy ;) Google Desktop Search for example however is a "buggy" LSP. Currently we are changing our LSP so it will follow the rules of those buggy LSPs when necessary. That way we end up with quite a stable solution. But it's lots of highly specialised work.
I believe other applications indeed integrate at an even lower level (like Symantec Antivirus) however this is much more complicated and it's hard to find programmers that understand it. Because of the competitative advantage the LSP gives us, we will not release the LSP part opensource for now. There maybe a construction possible in which we create a binairy that can be used by SpamBayes, I'll discuss this with Tony. Btw we're not considering LSPs .. we're using one ;) For those interested, SpamPal did opensource their LSP code. We tried to start building from this, but that turned out to be too complicated (since it's all integrated). Therefore we hired an LSP specialist. The SpamPal code could still be an option though for one of you guys to try. ___ Dreas van Donselaar CIO & co-founder SpamExperts Postbus 309 6200 AH Maastricht The Netherlands F: +31 (0)842203930 E: [EMAIL PROTECTED] W: http://www.spamexperts.com/ -----Original Message----- From: Richie Hindle [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: dinsdag 14 juni 2005 9:09 To: [email protected]; Dreas van Donselaar Subject: Re: [Spambayes] Just for one time a personal message to you 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
