Effective scheduling strategies for boosting performance on rule-based spam filtering frameworks

•Novel scheduling strategies for improving rule execution.•Latest developments for boosting anti-spam filter performance.•Increasing importance of new cloud-based spam-filtering services.•Anti-spam filter initialization and framework infrastructure.

Despite the enormous importance of e-mail to current worldwide communication, the increase of spam deliveries has had a significant adverse effect for all its users. In order to adequately fight spam, both the filtering industry and scientific community have developed and deployed the fastest and most accurate filtering techniques. However, the increasing volume of new incoming messages needing classification together with the lack of adequate support for anti-spam services on the cloud, make filtering efficiency an absolute necessity. In this context, and given the extensive utilization and increasing significance of rule-based filtering frameworks for the anti-spam domain, this work studies and analyses the importance of both existing and novel scheduling strategies to make the most of currently available anti-spam filtering techniques. Results obtained from the experiments demonstrated that some scheduling alternatives resulted in time savings of up to 26% for filtering messages, while maintaining the same classification accuracy.