A system and method are described for performing a correlative statistical analysis on a stream of email messages to identify new spam campaigns. For example, a method according to one embodiment of the invention comprises: extracting a series of patterns from a stream of incoming email messages; performing a correlation between the patterns to identify recurring patterns within the stream of email messages over a specified time period; dynamically updating a spam filtering engine to include a particular recurring pattern if the number of times the particular recurring pattern is detected within the specified time period is above a first specified threshold value.