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I have some friends in my contacts who are not very familiar with Komputerz. Apparently they have some kind of malware on their laptops that occasionally sends spam by their email address.

I am using Gmail and my friends are using different services (including Gmail and Yahoo! Mail).

Should I mark these emails as spam? Specifically, I just want to help Gmail to recognize these kind of emails as spam, but I don't want to make Gmail think my friends are spammers.

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Spam filters generally work against the content of the message.

In fact, given that spammers like to forge their From: headers and that, historically, there was no way to automatically validate the message's origin, most spam filters I'm familiar with don't really care about the From: address.

Despite being a GMail user myself, I'm not 100% sure about their implementation, but my advice is to just mark away. It's what I'd do in your situation.

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  • By marking these mails as spam, all other mails from the sender will go to spam (atleast after they are marked as spam a few times)
    – Akash
    Sep 16, 2011 at 12:03
  • @ssokolow: I still don't know what should I do with these emails. Should I mark them with the risk of what Akash said?
    – Isaac
    Sep 16, 2011 at 12:26
  • I've been googling around but I couldn't find any useful details on how GMail's spam filter acts in such cases. What I'd probably do is just mark them, keep an eye on the spam box, and hit "not spam" until GMail either goes back to the situation you're in now or gets the picture that your friends send both spam and non-spam e-mails and must be judged on other elements.
    – ssokolow
    Sep 16, 2011 at 20:21

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