The subject invention provides systems and methods that facilitate
obfuscating a spam filtering system to hinder reverse engineering of the
spam filters and/or to mitigate spammers from finding a message that
consistently gets through the spam filters almost every time. The system
includes a randomization component that randomizes a message score before
the message is classified as spam or non-spam so as to obscure the
functionality of the spam filter. Randomizing the message score can be
accomplished in part by adding a random number or pseudo-random number to
the message score before it is classified as spam or non-spam. The number
added thereto can vary depending on at least one of several types of
input such as time, user, message content, hash of message content, and
hash of particularly important features of the message, for example.
Alternatively, multiple spam filters can be deployed rather than a single
best spam filter.