 what s an auto ham automatically marking something as ham after a given timeout regardless of how long that timeout is someone is going to forget to submit the message back as spam ok here s a refinement assuming very little spam comes through we only need to pick a small percentage of ham received as new training ham to match the new training spam the program could randomly select a sufficient number of saved non spam msgs and ask the user to validate this selection you could do this once a day or week config parameter how many spams as hams can be accepted before the f n rate gets unacceptable config parameter i view imap as a stop gap measure until tighter integration with various email clients can be achieved i still feel it s better to require classification feedback from the recipient rather than make any assumptions after some period of time passes but this is an end user issue and we re still at the algorithm stage i m trying to think about the end user issues because i have nothing to contribute to the algorithm at this point for deployment we need both guido van rossum home page URL 