i think that when considering deployment a solution that supports all python platforms and not just the l unix crowd is desirable mac and pc users are more apt to be using a commercial mua that s unlikely to offer hooking ability at least not easily as mentioned elsewhere even l unix users may find an mua solution easier to use then getting it added to their mta sysops make programmers look like flaming liberals my notion of a solution for windows outlook has been as guido described a client server client side does popNUMBER imap mapi fetching of which i m only going to implement popNUMBER initially potentially on several hosts spamhams the incoming mail and puts it into one file per message qmail style the mua accesses this ethunk as a server to obtain all the ham spam is retained in the ethunk and a simple viewer would be used for manual oversight on the spam for ultimate rejection and training of spam filter and the ham will go forward after being used for training on the next mua fetch ethunk would sit on a timer for always online users but i am not clear on how to support dialup users with this scheme outbound mail would use a direct path from the mua to the mta hopefully all muas can split the host fetch send url s imo end users are likely to be more intested in n way classification if this is available the simple viewer could be enhanced to support viewing via folders and at least for me the outlook nightmare is over i would use this as my only mua n b according to my recent readings the best n way classifier uses something called a support vector machine svm which is NUMBER NUMBER more accurate then naive bayes nb i wonder if the focus of spambayes ought not to be a classifier that leaves the fetching and feeding of messages to auxillary code that way it could be dropped into whatever harness that suited the user s situation david leblanc seattle wa usa 