Method and system for identifying junk e-mail

摘要

The present invention is directed to a method and system for use in a computing environment to customize a filter utilized in classifying mail messages for a recipient. The present invention enables a recipient to reclassify a message that was previously classified by the filter, where the reclassification reflects the recipient's perspective of the class to which the message belongs. The reclassified messages are collectively stored in a training store. The information in the training store is then used to train the filter for future classifications, thus customizing the filter for the particular recipient. Further, the present invention is directed to adapting a filter to facilitate better detection and classification of spam over time by continuously retraining the filter. The retraining of the filter is an iterative process that utilizes previous spam fingerprints and message samples, to develop new spam fingerprints that are then utilized for the filtering process.