guido van rossum wrote i personally don t think imap has a bright future but for people who do use it that s certainly a good approach writing an imap server is a non trivial task the specification is huge and clients do all kinds of weird stuff pop is very easy in comparison perhaps you could forward messages to a special address or save them in a special folder to mark them as false negatives alternatively perhaps there could be a separate protocol and client that could be used to review additions to the training set each day a few random spam and ham messages could be grabbed as candidates someone would periodically startup the client review the candidates reclassify or remove any messages they don t like and add them to the training set neil 