Combining visual and textual features for filtering spam emails

In this paper we present a system for overcoming some of the problems that still remain with spam filters when checking emails that can contain attached images. A comparison with other state-of-the-art spam filters on a database containing both image and textual spam is also reported.

The presence of spam can seriously compromise normal user activities, forcing them to navigate through mailboxes to find the - relatively few - interesting emails. Even if a quite huge variety of spam filters has been developed until now, this problem is far to be resolved since spammers continuously modify their malicious techniques in order to bypass filters.