View article

Michaelson 57 ABSTRACT A technique, Specifically a method and apparatus that imple ments the method, which through a probabilistic classifier (370) and, for a given recipient, detects electronic mail (e-mail) messages, in an incoming message Stream, which that recipient is likely to consider" junk”. Specifically, the invention discriminates message content for that recipient, through a probabilistic classifier (eg, a Support vector machine) trained on prior content classifications. Through a resulting quantitative probability measure, ie, an output confidence level, produced by the classifier for each message and Subsequently compared against a predefined threshold, that message is classified as either, eg, Spam or legitimate mail, and, eg, then Stored in a corresponding folder (223, 227) for subsequent retrieval by and display to the recipient. Based on the probability measure, the message can alterna tively be …