 tim i gave it all the thought it deserved wink it would be tim wonderful to get several people cranking on the same test data and tim i m all in favor of that otoh my data subtree currently has tim more than NUMBER NUMBER files slobbering over NUMBER million bytes even if tim i had a place to put that much stuff i m not sure my isp would let tim me email it in one msg wink do you have a dialup or something more modern wink NUMBERmb of messages zipped would probably compress pretty well under NUMBERmb i d guess with all the similarity in the headers and such you could zip each of the NUMBER sets individually and upload them somewhere tim can you think of anyplace to get a large shareable ham sample tim apart from a public mailing list everyone s eager to share their tim spam but spam is so much alike in so many ways that s the easy tim half of the data collection problem how about random sampling lots of public mailing lists via gmane or something similar manually cleaning it distributing that load over a number of people and then relying on your clever code and your rebalancing script to help further cleanse it the problem with the ham is it tends to be much more tied to one person not just intimate but unique than the spam i save all incoming email for ten days gzipped mbox format before it rolls over and disappears at any one time i think i have about NUMBER NUMBER NUMBER NUMBER messages most of it isn t terribly personal which i would cull before passing along anyway and much of it is machine generated so would be of marginal use finally it s all ham n spam mixed together do we call that an omelette or a denny s grand slam skip 