A Study and Evaluation of Classifiers for Anti-Spam Systems

The volume of e-mails has been increasing in recent years. However, since 2005, at least half of these e-mails have been made up of spam. This massive traffic of unwanted messages causes losses to users, such as the excessive and unnecessary use of the bandwidth of their networks, loss of productivity, exposure of inappropriate content to inappropriate audiences etc. This paper proposes the study and the application of machine learning models to the classification of e-mails in existing anti-spam systems and, in particular, in the new anti-spam system Open-MaLBAS. After carrying out many experiments on different data sets, it was possible both to prove the feasibility of the proposal and to develop a powerful combination of techniques, methods, and models that can be successfully applied to the classification of e-mails in anti-spam systems. © 2013 IEEE.