bogofilter on cygwin (works)

[Boris 'pi' Piwinger]

"Tom Anderson" <tanderso at oac-design.com> wrote:

>> The question is: Who are the users? My impression is that
>> many users here are end users (meaning: people not running
>> the filter for several users, but only for themselves). This
>> user group often uses Windows and does not have access to
>> its mail server. So they cannot use Bogofilter. Not even
>> those who have a local (Windows) mail server as included in
>> the pretty popular Hamster package could run Bogofilter.
>
>It seems to me that users who prefer Windows would prefer commercial 
>solutions for their email filtering.  

Why would they? There are literally thousands of pages about
free software. Also there are a lot of products (like the
Mozilla family) which are widely used under Windows. Looking
at Sourceforge you find a lot of programs which run under
Windows:
http://sourceforge.net/search/?type_of_search=soft&words=windows

>Users who would prefer open source 
>solutions should likewise prefer open source operating systems.

I never understood why some people want to make sure that
people don't use open software.

>If there 
>were a bogofilter maintained for Windows, then I would suggest setting up a 
>for-profit company to provide support contracts, engage in marketing, and 
>defend lawsuits.  History would seem to indicate that only open source 
>projects which go this route have any success on Windows.  

???

>Otherwise, it is 
>probably a waste of time.  From my personal experience, I know that many 
>companies will not install open source programs without support contracts 
>and liable providers.  And home-users generally use web-based email these 
>days for their personal communications, and thus do not need local mail 
>filtering.

There are enough other people. Your view is extremely
narrow. This discussion comes from the attempt to run
bogofilter under Windows.

>Furthermore, I would prefer that the skilled and generous developers and 
>maintainers of bogofilter concentrate on continuing to make bogofilter 
>useful, not popular.  There are already too many popular but useless 
>programs out there.  Why should popularity be a goal of bogofilter?

Then why would we want to have documentation and an FAQ and
so forth? Who cares about users?

Popularity gives experience. Experience helps make things
better.

>It is already popular among those of us who appreciate its usefulness.  

I would rather hope it is popular among all of us here;->

>Let's not 
>degrade its popularity amongst its strongest supporters by losing that 
>focus.

???

pi