Abstract

Elecronic mail (E-mail) is an essential communication tool that has been greatly abused by spammers to disseminate unwanted information (messages) and spread malicious contents to Internet users. Current Internet technologies further accelerated the distribution of spam. Effective controls need to be deployed to countermeasure the ever growing spam problem. Machine learning provides better protective mechanisms that are able to control spam. This paper summarizes most common techniques used for anti-spam filtering by analyzing the e-mail content and also looks into machine learning algorithms such as Naïve Bayesian, support vector machine and neural network that have been adopted to detect and control spam. Each machine learning has its own strengths and limitations as such appropriate preprocessing need to be carefully considered to increase the effectiveness of any given machine learning.

Key words: Anti-spam filters, text categorization, electronic mail (E-mail), machine learning.