SpamBayes on Windows

This page has information for users of Microsoft Outlook, and for all other mail clients

Outlook 2000/2002(XP)/2003

Latest Release

The latest stable release is 1.0.4 - see the release notes or download the installation program.

General Information

The Outlook addin is an application of the SpamBayes project. To our knowledge, the current version of the plug-in should work with Windows 98 and above and Outlook 2000 or above. You may be able to get the plug-in to work with Windows 95 if you install the most recent version of Internet Explorer possible, but we are not certain about this. It does not work with Outlook Express - see below for other options.

In general, you should download and install the latest version, as shown above. Older versions and the release notes can be viewed at the SpamBayes releases page.

If you have a problem, the best way to help make progress is to look for a similar existing bug report and add any useful information you may have, or to open a new bug report if your problem seems to be a new one. Please be sure to go through the troubleshooting.html file that is installed with the plugin.

Installing the Outlook Client From Source

If the Outlook binary doesn't work for you, you can install from source. To do this, you will need three pieces of software:

1. The Python installer, available from the download page of the Python website. You should choose the latest stable release (that is, the latest release with no letters in its version).
2. Mark Hammond's pywin32 extensions. Choose the version which corresponds to the version of Python you downloaded.
3. The SpamBayes source, either as a zip file or via Subversion. The zip file will probably be easier to handle, but there may be improvements to the code which make the Subversion version a viable option (though you will have to have a Subversion client for Windows installed).

Once you have all three bits downloaded, run the Python installer then the pywin32 installer. Finally, double-click the addin.py script in the Outlook2000 folder of the SpamBayes distribution and you should be good to go. See the README.txt file in the Outlook2000 directory for more details

Windows users using other mail clients and retrieving mail via POP3 can download the same installation program and use it to install a binary version of sb_server, including a tray application.

See also the information about sb_server.

Thunderbird users might find the ThunderBayes extension useful. It provides tighter integrateion between Thunderbird and the SpamBayes POP3 proxy.

If you retrieve mail via IMAP, you currently need to install a recent version of Python and the SpamBayes source, then setup the IMAP filter) for your mail server.

The 1.1 release (see the download page) includes a binary version of sb_imapfilter. Although this is still currently in alpha, you might like to try it out.