[Spambayes] Terminology in user documentation: "spam" vs. "junk mail"

[Tim Peters]

[Guido]
> I agree that we need something better than "ham".
> Non-spam works for me; "good mail" too.

[Skip Montanaro]
> I don't think that's necessarily the case.  "Ham" has a certain
> panache.  It rolls of the tongue better than anything else I've
> seen.  It distinguishes Spambayes from the herd a bit, and may
> be a clever little bit of marketing.
> (I noted before that some people in the SpamAssassin community have
> picked up the term.)  I wouldn't change it until it's demonstrated
> to be a liability.

Another data point:  I gave a live demo of the Outlook 2000 client last
week, to a group of people who were taking a Python+Zope training class at
Zope Corp.  They laughed out loud at the "spam vs ham" distinction, which
surprised me because I've come to think of them as purely technical terms
identifying a region in chi-squared probability space.  That may intensify
suspicions that they were laughing at me instead of with me <wink>, but I do
think they genuinely enjoyed the word play.  The only thing that got a
bigger laugh was that a "Want a BIG penis NOW?" spam happened to arrive
during the demo.  If the choice is between "spam" and "ham", or "spam" and
"big penis", I'm weakly in favor of the former.

buncha-stuffed-shirts-ly y'rs  - tim