Identification of spam email based on information from email header

Abstract

Spam email becomes a big issue in email communication. It causes continuous problems to the network administrator and security expert to prevent or mitigate it effectively. There are many types of techniques used by the spammer to send illegitimate email messages. Most of the techniques used in email header. Spammer highlighted several information contained in the email header that can be converted or forged to mislead the spam detection system. In this paper, we highlight several features contained in the email header that can be used to identify and classify spam messages efficiently. Those features are selected based on their performance in detecting spam messages. This paper also commonalize each features contains in Yahoo mail, Gmail and Hotmail so that a generic spam messages detection mechanism could be proposed for all major email providers.