Unmasking Spam in Email Messages

Abstract: Today e-mails have become one of the most popular and economical forms of communication for Internet users. Thus due to its popularity, the e-mail is going to be misused. One such misuse is the posting of unwelcome, unwanted e-mails known as spam or junk e-mails. E-mail spam has various consequences. It reduces productivity, takes extra space in mail boxes, extra time, extend software damaging viruses, and materials that contains potentially harmful information for Internet users, destroy stability of mail servers, and as a result users spend lots of time for sorting incoming mail and deleting unwanted correspondence. So there is a need of spam detection so that its consequences can be reduced. In this paper, the focus is on various steps of spam detection such as pre-processing, representation of data, and classification for unmasking spam in e-mail messages. Further, some results, after applying the various spam detection steps have been displayed.

Keywords: Spam, Spam detection algorithm, Spam detection techniques, Email classification