MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W4297970707 · doi:10.1561/1500000006

Email Spam Filtering: A Systematic Review

2008· review· en· W4297970707 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueFoundations and Trends® in Information Retrieval · 2008
Typereview
Languageen
FieldComputer Science
TopicSpam and Phishing Detection
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Waterloo
Fundersnot available
KeywordsComputer scienceInformation retrievalWorld Wide Web

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Spam is information crafted to be delivered to a large number of recipients, in spite of their wishes. A spam filter is an automated tool to recognize spam so as to prevent its delivery. The purposes of spam and spam filters are diametrically opposed: spam is effective if it evades filters, while a filter is effective if it recognizes spam. The circular nature of these definitions, along with their appeal to the intent of sender and recipient make them difficult to formalize. A typical email user has a working definition no more formal than "I know it when I see it." Yet, current spam filters are remarkably effective, more effective than might be expected given the level of uncertainty and debate over a formal definition of spam, more effective than might be expected given the state-of-the-art information retrieval and machine learning methods for seemingly similar problems. But are they effective enough? Which are better? How might they be improved? Will their effectiveness be compromised by more cleverly crafted spam? We survey current and proposed spam filtering techniques with particular emphasis on how well they work. Our primary focus is spam filtering in email; Similarities and differences with spam filtering in other communication and storage media — such as instant messaging and the Web — are addressed peripherally. In doing so we examine the definition of spam, the user’s information requirements and the role of the spam filter as one component of a large and complex information universe. Well-known methods are detailed sufficiently to make the exposition self-contained, however, the focus is on considerations unique to spam. Comparisons, wherever possible, use common evaluation measures, and control for differences in experimental setup. Such comparisons are not easy, as benchmarks, measures, and methods for evaluating spam filters are still evolving. We survey these efforts, their results and their limitations. In spite of recent advances in evaluation methodology, many uncertainties (including widely held but unsubstantiated beliefs) remain as to the effectiveness of spam filtering techniques and as to the validity of spam filter evaluation methods. We outline several uncertainties and propose experimental methods to address them.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMeta-epidemiology (narrow)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Review · Consensus signal: Review
Teacher disagreement score0.821
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.002
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.002
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.039
GPT teacher head0.313
Teacher spread0.274 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it