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 there are many ways to do this some ideas a program that acts both as a pop client and a pop server you configure it by telling it about your real pop servers you then point your mail reader to the pop server at localhost when it receives a connection it connects to the remote pop servers reads your mail and gives you only the non spam to train it you d only need to send it the false negatives somehow it can assume that anything is ham that you don t say is spam within NUMBER hours a server with a custom protocol that you send a copy of a message and that answers spam or ham then you have a little program that is invoked e g by procmail that talks to the server the server exists so that it doesn t have to load the pickle with the scoring database for each message i don t know how big that pickle would be maybe loading it each time is fine or maybe marshalling your idea here takers how is esr s bogofilter packaged spamassassin the perl bayes filter advertised on slashdot guido van rossum home page URL 