Abstract. We propose a new string kernel based on variable-lengthdon't-care patterns (VLDC patterns). A VLDC pattern is an element of ({}) , where is an alphabet and is the variable-length-don't-care symbol that matches any string in . The number of VLDC patterns matching a given string s of length n is O(22n ). We present an O(n5 ) algorithm for computing the kernel value. We also propose variations of the kernel which modify the relative weights of each pattern. We evaluate our kernels using a support vector machine to classify spam data.