Intelligent Email Spam Detection and Deletion using LightGBM Classifier with Precision Optimization

Abstract

Email has become an indispensable communication tool, but the proliferation of spam emails poses significant chal- lenges, including security risks, productivity loss, and resource consumption. This paper presents an intelligent email spam detection system designed to accurately classify incoming emails as “spam” or “ham” (legitimate). The primary objective is to develop a high-precision model that guarantees legitimate emails are never incorrectly flagged as spam. The system leverages a LightGBM (Light Gradient Boosting Machine) classifier, a gra- dient boosting framework known for its efficiency and accuracy. The methodology involves comprehensive data preprocessing, advanced feature engineering including TF-IDF with n-grams, and custom metadata features. The final model was tuned using a precision-recall curve to achieve a precision of 100% on the test dataset, ensuring no false positives. This was accomplished with a high accuracy of approximately 98% and a strong recall of over 82%, demonstrating the system’s effectiveness in identifying a majority of spam emails while maintaining perfect precision.

Introduction

The rapid growth of digital communication has made email a prime target for spam, which wastes resources and poses security risks like phishing and malware. Traditional rule-based filters are no longer sufficient, as modern spammers use sophisticated tactics such as obfuscating words or embedding text in images.

This project focuses on a high-precision spam detection system using LightGBM, emphasizing 0% false positives to avoid misclassifying legitimate emails. The system incorporates data collection from multiple sources (Enron, UCI SMS, custom samples), preprocessing (tokenization, stopword removal, stemming), and feature engineering (TF-IDF text features and metadata like capitalization, link count, text length).

The modular architecture includes automated filtering, user feedback for corrections, and periodic retraining to adapt to new spam patterns. Experimental results demonstrate efficient, scalable, and adaptive spam classification suitable for real-time email protection.

Conclusion

This project successfully developed an intelligent email spam detection system using a LightGBM classifier with ad- vanced feature engineering. By prioritizing precision through threshold tuning, we achieved a model with 100% Precision, ensuring that no legitimate emails are lost. The system’s modu- lar architecture allows for easy scalability. The combination of cryptographic security measures and a user-friendly feedback loop makes it a practical solution for modern email security challenges.

References

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Copyright

Copyright © 2026 Prof. S. S. Bhosale , Akshay Kisan Dhayagonde, Soham Chetan KulKarni, Ritesh Prakash Birajdar, Sushant Haribhau Kope. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.