 your mail and gives you only the non spam to train it you d only need to send it the false negatives somehow it can assume that anything is ham that you don t say is spam within NUMBER hours i have folks who leave their email programs running NUMBER hours a day constantly polling for mail if they go away for a long weekend lots of friday night spam will become ham on sunday night friday night seems to be the most popular time so we ll make this a config parameter your idea here ultimately i d like to see tight integration into the most popular email clients as a stop gap to the auto ham what s an auto ham how about adding an imap server with a spam and deleted ham folder most email clients can handle imap users should be able to quickly move spam into the spam folder i personally don t think imap has a bright future but for people who do use it that s certainly a good approach instead of deleting messages or by reprogramming the delete function they can quickly move ham into the ham folder yes guido van rossum home page URL 