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Spam Detection Using an Artificial Immune System
rangeva writes "As anti-spam solutions evolve to limit junk email, the senders quickly adapt to make sure their messages are seen. an interesting article describes the application of an artificial immune system model to effectively protect email users from unwanted messages. In particular, it tests a spam immune system against the publicly available SpamAssassin corpus of spam and non-spam. It does so by classifying email messages with the detectors produced by the immune system. The resulting system classifies the messages with accuracy similar to that of other spam filters, but it does so with fewer detectors."
It looks fancy but when you get down to it, all it means is that there are a number of heuristics that are combined into filters (this happens by user training.) The filters are 'weighted' and filters that are not used often enough are 'culled' (killed off.) I don't think this will be significantly better than any other Bayesian-type spam systems.
You can't handle the truth.
I have to admit, I don't see the need for these recent wizbang horseless carriages. Sure, they might be ingenious, but on a practical level, they don't do anything more than a fine team of horses. yada yada
But seriously, your attitude is one that would stop all progress. This new method does the job more efficiently.
From TFA, The lightweight nature of this solution -- requiring significantly smaller number of detectors when compared to SpamAssassin -- will doubtlessly prove attractive to those looking to implement a server-based solution where processing overhead may well be an issue. A server-based solution would be a one-size-fits-all mold since the filter is not personalized and does not learn for each particular user, but the reduced processing and storage time makes such a solution attractive.
That sounds like a good reason for this research.
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable" - JFK
I'm seriously sick of people abusing biological methodolgies. People seem very attracted to ideas simply because they are grounded in "how nature works" and ignore the mathematical benefits or weaknesses. Now this idea pretty much just sounds like statistical rules based on a corpus - pretty much how every successful solution out there now works. This solution simply prunes rules that aren't being used, but there are better ways to get a smaller spam detection database. Have you seen the stuff the CRM114 people are doing? This is nothing new.
Read your Russell and Norvig, people. Airplane research didn't get off the ground (ugh) until we stopped trying to mimic birds and study physical principles of flight.
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
So it appears that you decided that the responsibility for fighting your spam should be moved onto the backs of everybody else on the Internet? Spam almost always comes from a forged sender. By doing this, you're just sending tons of spam to the forgery victims. Please do us and you a favor and google "challenge response harmful", and then turn off your C/R system.