The War Against Spam: A report from the front line
Venue
NIPS 2007 Workshop on Machine Learning in Adversarial Environments for Computer Security
Publication Year
2007
Authors
Brad Taylor, Dan Fingal, Douglas Aberdeen
BibTeX
Abstract
Fighting spam is a success story of real-world machine learning. Despite the
occasional spam that does reach our inboxes, the overwhelming majority of spam —
and there is a lot of it — is positively identified. At the same time, the rarity
with which users feel the need to check their spam box for false positives
demonstrates a high precision of classification. This paper is an overview of
Google’s approach to fighting email abuse with machine learning, and a discussion of
some lessons learned.
