Improved spam filter via handling of text embedded image E-mail

Abstract

The increase of image spam, a kind of spam in which the text message is embedded into attached image to defeat spam filtering technique, is a major problem of the current e-mail system. For nearly a decade, content based filtering using text classification or machine learning has been a major trend of anti-spam filtering system. Recently, spammers try to defeat anti-spam filter by many techniques. Text embedding into attached image is one of them. We proposed an ontology spam filters. However, the proposed system handles only text e-mail and the percentage of attached images is increasing sharply. The contribution of the paper is that we add image e-mail handling capability into the anti-spam filtering system keeping the advantages of the previous text based spam e-mail filtering system. Also, the proposed system gives a low false negative value, which means that user’s valuable e-mail is rarely regarded as a spam e-mail.