Spam
I have a 3-step process for spam. I can simply delete it, or I can report it first, or I can also block the sender's domain so I'm not bothered by that source again. I've got more that 500 domains blocked including "g-mail" because of all the spam I got from that there.
....
Mark, if you are blocking domains in your e-mail client, you might be making a mistake.
The reason I say this is 99.999% of
real SPAM uses a forged (ie not real) return e-mail address. So if you are blocking, say all G-mail (or yahoo-mail, etc) because the SPAM you receive has that as a return address, you end up blocking more
good e-mail then you want to.
If you are looking inside the headers, for the origin domain, looking for long-term patterns in this origin, then blocking that, well, that's how ISP's work their current blocking routines.
Well, that and heuristic studies on the verbage used, to score the e-mail for the chances that it is SPAM.
How most ISP handle SPAM today is a combination of (very) selective blocking of domains (mostly overseas, mostly Asia) and scoring of e-mail, according to rules people like me developed that looks at the content of the e-mail to try to determine of the e-mail is question is SPAM.
Since Google (and Yahoo and MSN and AOL) tend to be very aggressive in deleting actual SPAMer e-mail accounts.... I wouldn't bother with them.
One of the issues that Comcast has (in their efforts) is they get a little too agressive in blocking domains. Lets say that a domain in a given IP (comptuer address) pool is known to have an "open" e-mail server (something SPAMers like, most are "closed"). Comcast might block all domains inside the pool.
(note: open e-mail servers used to be the standard, all were "open", then SPAMers learned they could relay SPAM via these servers. So today almost all e-mail servers are "closed" and you can only use them if your IP is in their pool. Or why you can't use Eudora, Outlook, etc any place except at home)