Reliability Society Newsletter - August 2010 Feature Article:

You've Got Spam.
Some Notes on the Reliability of E-mail Message Filtering

by Christian K. Hansen, PhD, Eastern Washington University

Abstract

Since e-mail became widely adopted by the general public in the mid 90's there has been significant concerns regarding the reliability of e-mail viewed in terms of the probability that a transmitted message is correctly received by the intended recipient. While the reliability of the network over which the message is transmitted has always been a factor, over the last decade the strain on network capacity due to the massive broadcasts of spam messages has become a dominating factor in this. E-mail reliability is affected when a legitimate message is being falsely classified as a spam message (false positive) as well as when a spam message is being falsely classified as legitimate (false negative) the latter allowing potentially harmful content to pass on to the user's inbox along with a large number of unwanted messages drawing away attention to legitimate messages. In this article we look at some of the recent developments in spam filter design and its impact on e-mail reliability and we present the results of a case study in which two spam filters are tested in terms of "false negative" and "false positive" classifications.

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Views expressed in this article are those of the author and do represent officials views of the IEEE or the Reliability Society. The mentioning of a particular product in this article does not constitute an endorsement by the author, the IEEE or the Reliability Society.