Towards eradication of SPAM: A study on intelligent adaptive SPAM filters

摘要

As the massive increase of electronic mail (email) usage continues, SPAM (unsolicited bulk email), has continued to grow because it is a very inexpensive method of advertising. These unwanted emails can cause a serious problem by filling up the email inbox and thereby leaving no space for legitimate emails to pass through. Currently the only defense against SPAM is the use of SPAM filters. A novel SPAM filter GetEmail5 along with the design rationale, is described in this thesis. To test the efficacy of GetEmail5 SPAM filter, an experimental setup was created and a commercial bulk email program was used to send SPAM and non-SPAM emails to test the new SPAM filter. ududGetEmail5's efficiency and ability to detect SPAM was compared against two highly ranked commercial SPAM filters on different sets of emails, these included all SPAM, non-SPAM, and mixed emails, also text and HTML emails.ududThe results showed the superiority of GetEmail5 compared to the two commercial SPAM filters in detecting SPAM emails and reducing the user's involvement in categorizing the incoming emails. ududThis thesis demonstrates the design rationale for GetEmail5 and also its greater effectiveness in comparison with the commercial SPAM filters tested.