(CC'ing python-dev because I think there's a simple improvement/fix for dumbdbm here.) I realize we (the Spambayes folks) want to discourage people from using dumbdbm, but for those who are either stuck with it or don't realize they are using it, I wonder if we can do a little something to help them out. As I understand it, if a machine crashes or is shut down without exiting Outlook, there's a good chance that the dumbdbm's _commit method won't have been called and the directory and data files will be out-of-sync. It seems that dumbdbm doesn't support a sync() method which shelve likes to call. Shelve's sync method gets called from time-to-time by the Spambayes storage code. dumbdbm.sync has this statement: if hasattr(self.dict, 'sync'): self.dict.sync() so maybe it's as simple (short-term) as modifying dbmstorage.open_dumbdbm() to def open_dumbdbm(*args): """Open a dumbdbm database.""" import dumbdbm db = dumbdbm.open(*args) if not hasattr(db, "sync"): db.sync = db._commit return db The above should help. Meanwhile, it appears that would be a good method to add to dumbdbm databases both for 2.3 and the 2.2 maintenance branch. Skip