MailProtect : Your Email Spam Protection

Overview

This project is a spam detection and email protection system that uses a linear model to classify messages as spam or not spam. The system includes a web application for spam detection and a script for processing emails and marking spam.

Motivation

Email spam is a significant issue, with billions of spam emails sent daily. Spam emails can lead to phishing attacks, malware infections, and data breaches. According to recent statistics:

• Over 50% of all email traffic is spam.
• Phishing attacks account for 90% of data breaches.
• The average cost of a data breach is $3.86 million. This project aims to provide a robust solution for detecting and managing spam emails, helping to protect users from potential threats.

Project Structure

app.py
credentials.txt
data/
    spam.csv
model.py
notebooks/
    spam-detection.ipynb
protection.py
readme.md
requirements.txt
test/
    test.py
models/
    tfid_vectorizer.pkl
    logistic_regression.pkl

How to Run the Project

Prerequisites

Python 3.x Required Python packages (listed in requirements.txt)

Installation

1. Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/your-repo/spam-detection.git
cd spam-detection

2. Install the required packages:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Running the Web Application

To test the web application for spam detection: Execute the app.py script:

streamlit run app.py

Open your web browser and navigate to the URL provided by Streamlit.

Running the Email Protection Script

The email protection script can be run in two modes: normal mode and job mode.

Normal Mode

You can run the script once . Ensure your email credentials are stored in credentials.txt in the format username:password. Execute the protection.py script:

python protection.py

Job Mode

You can execute a cron job to fetch and process emails in every 5 mins. Ensure your email credentials are stored in credentials.txt in the format username:password. Execute the protection.py script with the --job argument: In job mode, the script will run periodically (every 5 minutes by default) to fetch and process emails.

python protection.py --job

How the protection script works

1. Load Credentials: The script loads email credentials from credentials.txt.
2. Connect to Email Provider: It connects to the email provider's IMAP server using the credentials.
3. Fetch Emails: The script fetches unseen emails from the inbox.
4. Extract Email Content: It extracts the subject and body of each email.
5. Detect Spam: The script uses the pre-trained logistic regression model and TF-IDF vectorizer to classify emails as spam or not spam.
6. Mark Spam: If an email is classified as spam, it is marked accordingly in the inbox and stored in the Spam/Junk folder.

How to enable IMAP server connection for Gmail

To enable imap mail reading in gmail you need to :

1. Enable less secure apps feature : https://myaccount.google.com/lesssecureapps?pli=1

2. Enable Imap setting in Gmail(Not Google) Gmail Settings -> Forwarding and POP / IMAP -> IMAP Access to Enable IMAP

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for more details.