Email Spam Filtering using Supervised Machine Learning Techniques

E-mail spam, known as unsolicited bulk Email (UBE), junk mail, or unsolicited commercial email (UCE), is the practice of sending unwanted e-mail messages, frequently with commercial content, in large quantities to an indiscriminate set of recipients. Spam is prevalent on the Internet because the transaction cost of electronic communications is radically less than any alternate form of communication. There are many spam filters using different approaches to identify the incoming message as spam, ranging from white list / black list, Bayesian analysis, keyword matching, mail header analysis, postage, legislation, and content scanning etc. Even though we are still flooded with spam emails everyday. This is not because the filters are not powerful enough, it is due to the swift adoption of new techniques by the spammers and the inflexibility of spam filters to adapt the changes. In our work, we employed supervised machine learning techniques to filter the email spam messages. Widely used supervised machine learning techniques namely C 4.5 Decision tree classifier, Multilayer Perceptron, Naive Bayes Classifier are used for learning the features of spam emails and the model is built by training with known spam emails and legitimate emails. The results of the models are discussed.