(trimming the cc list a bit, since this is drifting a bit away from strictly discussing the current algorithm.) Anthony> For what it's worth, the attached (simple) script will Anthony> 'de-spamassassin' an email message. I use it on my 'spam' Anthony> folder to get test messages of various ugly MIME things that Anthony> spam and viruses let through... Thanks, that helps me as well, as I need to delete the X-VM-* headers Emacs's VM mail package inserts. While spamassassin -d does what you are doing, it can be easily extended to elide other headers as well. One thing worth noting before everybody starts using it to massage their mailboxes is that the email package contains a bug which causes it to occasionally delete whitespace when reformatting headers. For example, in one example, the header went from Received: from rogers.com ([24.43.65.252]) by fep02-mail.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com (InterMail vM.5.01.05.06 201-253-122-126-106-20020509) with ESMTP id <20020820205424.DFHH4777.fep02-mail.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com@rogers.com>; Tue, 20 Aug 2002 16:54:24 -0400 to Received: from rogers.com ([24.43.65.252]) by fep02-mail.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com (InterMail vM.5.01.05.06 201-253-122-126-106-20020509) with ESMTPid <20020820205424.DFHH4777.fep02-mail.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com@rogers.com>; Tue, 20 Aug 2002 16:54:24 -0400 Note that in the second version there is no space between "ESMTP" and "id", which had previously been separated by a newline and several spaces. I filed a bug report about it a few days ago: http://python.org/sf/594893 Skip