 yeah that s exactly what i was doing i didn t realize i was incurring administrative pickle bloat this way i m specifically trying to make things faster and smaller so i m storing individual wordinfo pickles into an anydbm dict keyed by token the result is that it s almost NUMBER times faster to score messages one per run our of procmail NUMBERs vs NUMBER NUMBERs this is very worthwhile however it does say all over the place that the goal of this project isn t to make the fastest or the smallest implementation so i guess i ll hold off doing any further performance tuning until the goal starts to point more in that direction NUMBER seconds is probably fast enough for people to use it in their procmailrc which is what i was after maybe i batch messages using fetchmail don t ask why and adding NUMBER seconds per message for a batch of NUMBER not untypical feels like a real wait to me guido van rossum home page URL 