The End of SpamBayes (for me)
I've been happily using SpamBayes for years (almost 5 to be exact) as my SPAM filter. Its worked remarkably well for a free Microsoft Outlook Add-in. However, something happened today and things haven't been right since.
Lots of SPAM
From looking in my SPAM folder (which I don't clean out as often as I should -- more on that later), I receive between 650 and 750 pieces of SPAM every day. However, most of that -- I'd say at least 95% -- I never see. SpamBayes scores it as SPAM, moves it to the SPAM folder and marks it as read. I probably have to review about 10 - 20 "SPAM Suspects" a day and about 98% of those really were SPAM. It's a pretty good solution.
Lots of Mail
I have to admit that I rarely delete email. I don't know why that is. I like having an electronic paper trail of my sent mail and I've got a decent folder structure within my Inbox to categorize almost every piece of incoming mail (it's not perfect -- but it's decent). I do perform manual archiving from time to time, but I don't do it nearly as often as I should. That's why my SPAM folder had tens of thousands of emails that allowed me to compute my average of 650-750 SPAMs per day.
Beginning of the end
Sometime early this morning, Outlook did it's regularly scheduled download of email. I was doing something else when it happened but I suddently got some error from SpamBayes. I don't recall the exact wording, but it had something to do about not being able to access my SPAM folder. I thought that was odd so I switched to Outlook and noticed a block of about 20 SPAM emails sitting in my Inbox. You could tell from the sender and the subject that they were SPAM. Plus, they where new but marked as Read (SpamBayes is set to do that). I wasn't sure why these emails couldn't be moved to the SPAM folder and I didn't want to mess with it at the time so I just selected them all and hit <Delete>.
That's when I got the next error. This time from Outlook. Again, I don't recall the exact wording, but it was basically "Your PST file has reached it's limits. You need to trim it down a bit. You know Outlook can handle more than one PST, don't you?!" I do use multiple PST files. In fact, I even have separate PST's for each year that I archive old mail into, but hadn't done that in a while.
So I take a peek at the size of my PST file -- 1.8GB. Yeah, gigabytes. I'm almost embarassed to admit it. I wasn't really too upset though. Outlook has been running slowly the past few months and I knew the size of my PST file had to have something to do with it.
Cleanup Time
So I spent an hour or so cleaning out my inbox. I found old stuff from 2004 that I quickly deleted. Other stuff got moved to my archive PST's. And I cleaned out all of the old SPAMs that were loading up my SPAM folder. Lots and lots of cleanup.
I then told Outlook to compact the PST file. After about 45 minutes, it was down to a much more reasonable 344 megs. SUCCESS! I thought I'd be flying now. So I shutdown and restarted Outlook.
It's even slower?!
My visions of a newly revitalized Outlook were crushed as soon as Outlook started. Or should I say, when it finally started. It was crawling! And I'm not talking just receiving email (which was easily 2 - 3 times slower than it used to be). Switching folders took close to 30 seconds. Yes, 30 seconds! I timed it. I would click on a different email folder and start counting: one-one thousand, two-one thousand, three-one thousand... Usually around 10 - 15 seconds I would get a busy cursor. At around 25 - 30 seconds, focus would suddenly shift away from Outlook (like a little gnome had walked on my keyboard and pressed ALT-TAB to switch to a different app). When I switched back to Outlook, the folder I clicked on was now displayed.
Was it a problem with one particular folder? Nope, I spent a few minutes trying various folders. Any folder switching was a 25-30 second wait while Outlook was basically unresponsive. I was really looking forward to a speedier Outlook after doing so much house cleaning.
My Feeble Attempts at Recovery
So I did a google search on "Outlook 2007 performance". Whoa -- that's scary. 26 million hits?! Ok, let's start browsing a few and see if anything stands out. Of course, the obvious one -- reduce the size of your PST file. I went from 1.8GB down to 344MB, so I think that one can be marked complete. Defrag the hard drive. Ok, I used the Diskeeper Lite that came with my laptop to defragment the hard drive. And then I rebooted. Outlook was still crawling.
Another tip was disabling all add-ins. I tried that too (all except for SpamBayes since I couldn't really live without it and it's been working fine since 2003). Still no luck. I finally decided to disable SpamBayes just to see what would happen.
Bingo! Outlook was running much quicker now. I could happily click, click, click across different folders with no delay. I don't know what chain of events caused SpamBayes to work so flawlessly for 5 years and then all of a sudden cause me problems like this. I'm still not convinced its SpamBayes fault, but Outlook just isn't usable right now unless I disable SpamBayes.
Cloudmark Desktop
I've read a lot of good things about Cloudmark Desktop so I downloaded the trial and installed it. So far so good. Installation was quick and painless and it's already caught it's fair share of SPAM. I've got 15 days to see if this is right for me and then it'll be only $40/year after that. Not too bad when you consider how much time I would waste cleaning out SPAM manually.