Hoodwinking spam email filters
Wanli Ma, Dat Thanh Tran, Dharmendra Kumar Sharma, LI Sen · 2007
Abstract:- Many spam email filters have been proposed, however spammers regularly find new ways of hoodwinking those filters. Most of those filters are text based and hence spammers try to conceal the text which reveals the spam nature of an email. In order to investigate the ways spammers are using, we consider a large set of spam emails and found that we can classify these emails into 5 categories which are text based, obfuscating, image based, HTML tags, and non-English. We counted the percentage of spam emails in each category and then used a sample spam filter to evaluate the effectiveness of the filter on each of the categories. The TREC Spam Filter Evaluation Toolkit was used in our evaluation. Key-Words:- Spam email, Text based spam email filter, TREC Spam Filter Evaluation Toolkit.