Advanced Spam Detection Techniques

• US 20130318116A1
• Filed: 08/01/2013
• Published: 11/28/2013
• Est. Priority Date: 06/23/2003
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC (Microsoft Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
• Inventors: Starbuck, Bryan T., Rounthwaite, Robert L., Heckerman, David E., Goodman, Joshua T., Gillum, Eliot C., Howell, Nathan D., Aldinger, Kenneth R.
• Granted Patent: US 9,305,079 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 707/758
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/30 of unstructured textual data document management systems G06F16/93
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 10/107 Computer-aided management of electronic mailing [e-mailing]
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 51/212 using filtering or selective blocking

Abstract

The subject invention provides for an advanced and robust system and method that facilitates detecting spam. The system and method include components as well as other operations which enhance or promote finding characteristics that are difficult for the spammer to avoid and finding characteristics in non-spam that are difficult for spammers to duplicate. Exemplary characteristics include examining origination features in pairs, analyzing character and/or number sequences, strings, and sub-strings, detecting various entropy levels of one or more character sequences, strings and/or sub-strings as well as analyzing message and/or feature sizes.

Claims

1. A spam detection system comprising:

a component that analyzes a portion of a message via searching for particular character sequences that are indicative of spam, wherein the particular sequences are not restricted to whole words; and

a component that generates features relating to the character sequences of any length.