I’ve talked about ThunderBayes (the Thunderbird front-end for the SpamBayes anti-spam engine) here before, several times. It’s great. Unfortunately it’s no longer supported, and I don’t have the time to properly learn Javascript so I can fix it myself. So when an SSL update broke my customized version of it a couple days ago, I decided to scrap it entirely.

I wasn’t willing to scrap the SpamBayes engine though, so after getting my Thunderbird setup working again, I dug into the instructions on how to install the 1.04 version manually (the 1.1 alpha version is the one that the SSL update broke). It wasn’t all that difficult, but I don’t recommend it for anyone who isn’t at least a power-user… I had to install an older version of Python to get it working properly (it only partially works with the 2.6 version that Ubuntu comes with), and chain it through stunnel to get SSL support (that’s why I wanted the 1.1 alpha in the first place, it supports SSL without stunnel). And without ThunderBayes, you have to go through a web interface to train it, which is a pain in the tail. But eventually I got it all working properly.

Some day I hope to have the time to learn JavaScript properly, so I can fix ThunderBayes and maybe write some other useful extensions for Thunderbird and Firefox. But for now, this will suffice.