CORRELATING WEB AND EMAIL ATTRIBUTES TO DETECT SPAM

A computer correlates web and email attributes to detect spam. A security module on a client collects attributes of a web site to which an email address was submitted and attributes of an email message sent to the email address that was previously submitted. The security module analyzes the attributes of the web site and the email message to determine whether the email message was sent to the email address responsive to the submission of the email address to the web site. Based on the analysis, the security module determines whether the email message is spam. A machine learning module on a security server establishes training data describing the attributes of the web site to which email addresses were submitted and attributes of legitimate emails received in response to the address submissions. The machine learning module generates an attributes classifier for the security module for spam detection.