on fri NUMBER sep NUMBER guido van rossum wrote quite independently from testing and tuning the algorithm i d like to think about deployment eventually individuals and postmasters should be able to download a spambayes software distribution answer a few configuration questions about their mail setup training and false positives and install it as a filter a more modest initial goal might be the production of a tool that can easily be used by individuals since we re more likely to find individuals willing to risk this than postmasters my impression is that a pre collected corpus would not fit most individuals very well but each individual or group should collect their own corpus one problem that comes upp immediately individuals are lazy if i currently get NUMBER spam and NUMBER ham a day and i ll have to press the delete button once for each spam i ll be happy to press the spam button instead however if in addition have to press a ham button for each ham it starts to look much less like a win to me add the time to install and setup the whole machinery and i ll just keep hitting delete the suggestions so far have been to hook something on the delete action that adds a message to the ham corpus i see two problems with this the ham will be a bit skewed mail that i keep around without deleting will not be counted secondly if i by force of habit happen to press the delete key instead of the spam key i ll end up with spam in the ham anyways i would like to look for a way to deal with spam in the ham the obvious thing to do is to trigger on the spam button and at that time look for messages similar to the deleted one in the ham corpus and simply remove them to do this we need a way to compare two word count histograms to see how similar they are any ideas also i personally would prefer to not see the spam at all if they get bounced preferably already in the smtp false positives become the senders problem to rewrite to remove the spam smell in a well tuned system then there spam corpus will be much smaller than the ham corpus so it would be possible to be slightly over agressive when clearing potential spam from the ham corpus this should make it easier to keep it clean having a good way to remove spam from the ham corpus there s less need to worry about it getting there by mistake and we might as well simply add all messages to the ham corpus that didn t get deleted by the spam filtering it might also be useful to have a way to remove messages from the spam corpus in case of user ooops paul 