Email Spam Detection using Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Deep Learning

DOI

No DOI

Published In

Volume 5, Issue 5 (2025)

Published Online

September-October 2025

Pages

33-35

Article Type

Original Article

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The rapid growth of digital communication has led to an overwhelming influx of unsolicited and often harmful emails, commonly known as spam. These messages not only degrade user experience but also serve as vectors for phishing, malware, and fraudulent activities. Traditional spam detection methods— relying on rule-based filters and classical machine learning—struggle to keep pace with the evolving tactics used by modern spammers. This project proposes an advanced spam detection system that leverages Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Deep Learning techniques to accurately classify email messages as spam or legitimate (ham). The methodology begins with robust text preprocessing, including tokenization, stop-word removal, and lemmatization, followed by feature extraction using word embeddings (Word2Vec, GloVe) and contextual embeddings (BERT). To capture the sequential and contextual nature of email content, we implement deep learning architectures such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), and Transformer-based models. These models are trained and evaluated on benchmark datasets such as the Enron Email Dataset, SpamAssassin, and Ling-Spam. Experimental results demonstrate that deep learning approaches significantly outperform traditional machine learning classifiers in terms of accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score, offering a scalable and adaptive solution to the spam detection problem. With the exponential increase in email usage across personal, corporate, and commercial domains, the threat posed by spam emails has grown significantly. Spam not only clutters inboxes but often carries malicious intent, including phishing links, malware attachments, and deceptive advertising. As spammers evolve their techniques to bypass traditional rule-based filters and keyword-based approaches, the need for intelligent, adaptive spam detection systems has become more urgent.