Choosing the best classier for the job: Mobile Filtering for the South African Context
Marissa Griesel, Wildrich Fourie · 2012
Short messages to cell phones (SMSs) have become the most popular means of communication on digital fronts, especially in Africa and South Africa in particular. This inspires the abuse of such systems by advertisers through the distribution of SPAM. It has therefore become necessary to incorporate a ltering system similar to e-mail classication on these low resource devices. In this article one practical method of ltering such messages for smart phones is described. A prototype application dubbed SpaMiNot intercepts incoming SMS messages and evaluates the message(s) with a number of lters. The application then classies the message as legitimate (HAM) or unwanted (SPAM). HAM messages are left unhindered, while messages marked as SPAM can either be automatically deleted or stored in a SPAM list, from where it can be restored or deleted. The Android TM platform was chosen due to its recent and signicant rise in popularity, as well as the ease and speed of Android application development. The application has been thoroughly tested on Android emulators and the Vodafone TM 845 device.