so then guido van rossum guido python org is all like basic procmail usage goes something like this NUMBERfw spamassassin p NUMBER x spam status yes spam do you feel capable of writing such a tool it doesn t look too hard not to beat a dead horse but that s exactly what my spamcan package did for those just tuning in spamcan is a thingy i wrote before i knew about tim co s work on this crazy stuff you can download it from URL but i m not going to work on it anymore i m currently writing a new one based on classifier and timtest s booty kicking tokenizer i ll probably have something soon like maybe half an hour and no it s not too hard the hard part is storing the data somewhere i don t want to use zodb as i d like something a person can just drop in with a default python install so anydbm is looking like my best option i already have a setup like this using xavier leroy s spamoracle which does the same sort of thing you call it from procmail it adds a new header and then you can filter on that header really easy here s how i envision this working everybody gets four new mailboxes train eggs train spam trained eggs trained spam you copy all your spam and eggs into the train boxes as you get it how frequently you do this would be up to you but you d get better results if you did it more often and you d be wise to always copy over anything which was misclassified then every night the spam fairy swoops down and reads through your folders learning about what sorts of things you think are eggs and what sorts of things are spam after she s done she moves your mail into the trained folders this would work for anybody using imap on a unix box or folks who read their mail right off the server i ve spoken with some fellows at work about exchange and they seem to beleive that exchange exports appropriate functionality to implement a spam fairy as well advanced users could stay ahead of the game by reprogramming their mail client to bind the key s to move to train spam and h to move to train eggs eventually if enough people used this sort of thing it d start showing up in mail clients that s the delete as spam button paul graham was talking about the hormel company might not think well of using the word ham as the opposite of spam and they ve been amazingly cool about the use of their product name for things thus far so i propose we start calling non spam something more innocuous and more monty pythonic such as eggs neale 