Patent ID: 7734703

Claim:
A computer-implemented method for detecting unwanted messages in real-time at a message delivery host, the method comprising: providing a plurality of statuses for keys associated with messages, the statuses indicating actions to take with messages and having a precedence order from a high priority to a low priority; providing a key store that stores an indication of keys along with a status for each key; receiving from a user an indication of a key and its status; after receiving the key, storing an indication of the received key and its status in the key store; for each of a plurality of attributes of the message, generating a key for the message based on the attribute of the message; for each generated key, determining a status associated with the generated key as indicated by the key store; and processing the message according to the statuses associated with the generated keys by: selecting the status associated with a generated key that has the highest priority; and performing the action of the selected status with the message.