The first public version of Fetchem has been released. It can be found at "http://sourceforge.net/projects/fetchem/". Fetchem is a download/filter/decode program for image newsgroups written entirely in Python. It uses a variety of algorithms to filter spam out of image newsgroups. There is currently so much spam in these newsgroups that it has become very difficult to read them. Good spam filters require a fully powered programming language. Some of the spam can be removed by regex searches of the news article headers. But removing other spam, including the notorious high volume PH.E'R-OM,O^NE spam, requires the power of a complete programming language. Since Python (http://www.python.org) is easy to read and write, it is used in Fetchem. FEATURES Some of the features of Fetchem (terrible name) are: 1. Powerful filtering capabilities that the user can reprogram. (See match.py.) 2. Prepares HTML for your browser. "html.py" contains (yet another) HTML writing program. It uses Python's keyword arguments to pass in the attributes for each tag. For example, FONT('stuff', Color='ff0000') returns the string <FONT COLOR="ff0000">stuff</A> 3. The header data is kept in a robust MySQL database. 4. Downloads news article headers and bodies. Uses the uudeview library to decode the images. 5. Interfaces with your browser using a proxy server written using medusa. REQUIREMENTS A Linux system with Python 2.0 installed. MySQL, MySQLdb, medusa, and uudeview should be present.