One of the issues with spam is false positives. “Did you check your spam folder” is often a question to ask if your email is not received on the other end.
I’m not a machine learning expert and I’ve never made a spam filter, and I only know the naive Bayes approach. So this suggestion is not a machine-learning “breakthrough”. But from what I know about classification algorithms is that they usually provide a likelihood of one item being in one group or another. Some items are not identified as spam with absolute certainty – they are 51% likely to be spam, for example.
My suggestions is: for borderline items (lower certainty that they should be classified as spam), the spam filter should send emails to the sender indicating that his message was considered spam. A genuine sender will probably take additional steps, like sending another short email or calling/messaging the recipient (‘click here to confirm you are not spam’ won’t work, because it will easily be automated).
It’s rather a usability suggestion than a technical one, and I’m sure there are some issues that I’m missing. But I thought it’s at least worth sharing.
One of the issues with spam is false positives. “Did you check your spam folder” is often a question to ask if your email is not received on the other end.
I’m not a machine learning expert and I’ve never made a spam filter, and I only know the naive Bayes approach. So this suggestion is not a machine-learning “breakthrough”. But from what I know about classification algorithms is that they usually provide a likelihood of one item being in one group or another. Some items are not identified as spam with absolute certainty – they are 51% likely to be spam, for example.
My suggestions is: for borderline items (lower certainty that they should be classified as spam), the spam filter should send emails to the sender indicating that his message was considered spam. A genuine sender will probably take additional steps, like sending another short email or calling/messaging the recipient (‘click here to confirm you are not spam’ won’t work, because it will easily be automated).
It’s rather a usability suggestion than a technical one, and I’m sure there are some issues that I’m missing. But I thought it’s at least worth sharing.
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