Machine learning for email spam filtering: review, approaches and open research problems

• Published in: Heliyon Vol. 5; no. 6; p. e01802
• Main Authors: Dada, Emmanuel Gbenga, Bassi, Joseph Stephen, Chiroma, Haruna, Abdulhamid, Shafi'i Muhammad, Adetunmbi, Adebayo Olusola, Ajibuwa, Opeyemi Emmanuel
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: England Elsevier Ltd 01.06.2019; Elsevier
• Subjects: Analysis of algorithms; Computer privacy; Computer science; Computer security; Deep learning; Machine learning; Naïve Bayes; Neural networks; Spam filtering; Support vector machines; Computer science; Deep learning; Support vector machines; Naïve Bayes; Spam filtering; Neural networks; Machine learning; Analysis of algorithms; Computer security; Computer privacy
• ISSN: 2405-8440; 2405-8440
• DOI: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2019.e01802

The upsurge in the volume of unwanted emails called spam has created an intense need for the development of more dependable and robust antispam filters. Machine learning methods of recent are being used to successfully detect and filter spam emails. We present a systematic review of some of the popular machine learning based email spam filtering approaches. Our review covers survey of the important concepts, attempts, efficiency, and the research trend in spam filtering. The preliminary discussion in the study background examines the applications of machine learning techniques to the email spam filtering process of the leading internet service providers (ISPs) like Gmail, Yahoo and Outlook emails spam filters. Discussion on general email spam filtering process, and the various efforts by different researchers in combating spam through the use machine learning techniques was done. Our review compares the strengths and drawbacks of existing machine learning approaches and the open research problems in spam filtering. We recommended deep leaning and deep adversarial learning as the future techniques that can effectively handle the menace of spam emails.