Software developed to filter spam from incoming SMSes

NEW DELHI: Tired of junk messages flooding your cell phone inbox? Try SMSAssassin -- a software that segregates spams from regular messages.

Being a cheap option to reach the masses, Short Message Service( SMS) are being widely used by marketeers for offering value added services and advertisement. However, these spam messages is a problem for all mobile users because the inbox gets full with advertising messages or even with infected attachments.

Even the countermeasures offered by the government has failed to stop spam SMSes.

According to available data, in India an estimate 100 million spam messages are sent every day. Companies dedicated for SMS-based advertising solution have been launched and they are able to reach to 1,00,000 people in about Rs 3,500.

"This is what inspired us to come up with SMSAssassin," Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, assistant professor at Indian Institute of Information Technology - Delhi, said.

"SMSAssasin performs the spam filtering automatically. It is designed to run on mid-range phones wherein it filters such spam messages and also gives user freedom to receive SMSes which are spams but still useful to him or her," he said.

Kumaraguru said a study conducted by his team of researchers in IIIT-Delhi found that an SMS is a spam or not, differed from person to person.

"Females mostly tagged message related to festivals offers, beauty products, discount offers on food/goods etc as ham; males mostly tagged messages related to sports, businesses(opening of new shop etc), job, studies, social gathering and recharge schemes related messages as ham. Further, We have observed that most of food discount offers were tagged as ham by males and females both," he said.

Since the spam SMS keywords and patterns keep on changing, SMSAssassin uses crowd sourcing to keep itself updated, he said, adding, "the software is currently designed to run on Nokia's Symbian operating system, but the team is also developing versions for Google Android and Windows Mobile."