A Collaborative Anti-Spam E-mail Filter

Abstract

Email has become one of the most important applications on the Internet. In recent years, system administrators and Internet users tried their best to solve the email spam problem. The problem is that spammers have the ability to send huge amount of junk emails with a low cost and derive a large reward from spamming. In this paper, we design and implement a collaborative anti-spam e-mail filter (CASEF) system to filter the spam. It acts as an email gateway to filter inbound and outbound messages by enforcing an organizationâ s email policies. Our proposed method exploits the fact that spamming distributes lots of identical spam mails at the same time. CASEF also provides a web-based administrative interface for performing system configuration tasks and for setting up filtering policies. Our system not only blocks the recurring spam mails at the gateway but also achieves higher accuracy than SpamAssassin.