Patent ID: 7328250

Claim:
A method comprising: determining a sender identifier based on a sender of an incoming email; determining a cumulative penalty count value associated with said sender identifier, wherein determining said cumulative penalty count value comprises assessing a penalty count value to said sender identifier for an undesirable activity performed by the sender; retrieving a system overall resource usage status associated with the communication device; and processing the incoming e-mail on the basis of said cumulative penalty count value and said system overall resource usage status, wherein said step of processing the incoming e-mail comprises assigning an operating state to the communication device, said operating state being a function of said system overall resource usage status, and said operating state is a number of the group consisting of: a normal operating state, a selective-rejection operating state, and a random-rejection operating state, wherein, for said selective-rejection state, if said cumulative penalty count value has a nonzero value, said step of processing the incoming e-mail comprises: specifying a rejection factor; generating a random number; and randomly rejecting the incoming e-mail on the basis of said rejection factor and said random number, and wherein said step of randomly rejecting comprises accepting the incoming e-mail if said random number is greater than said rejection factor and rejecting the incoming e-mail if said random number is not greater than said rejection factor.