Analyzing Behavioral Features for Email Classification.
Steve Martin, Blaine A. Nelson, Anil Sewani, Karl Chen, Anthony Douglas Joseph · Conference on Email and Anti-Spam · 2005
Many researchers have applied statistical analysis techniques to email for classification purposes, such as identifying spam messages. Such approaches can be highly effective, however many examine incoming email exclusively — which does not provide detailed information about an individual user’s behavior. Only by analyzing outgoing messages can a user’s behavior be ascertained. Our contributions are: the use of empirical analysis to select an optimum, novel collection of behavioral features of a user’s email traffic that enables the rapid detection of abnormal email activity; and a demonstration of the effectiveness of outgoing email analysis using an application that detects worm propagation.