Patent 7533148 was granted and assigned to Microsoft on May, 2009 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
A method that enables multiple spam detection solutions to be deployed in a manageable and rational manner to determine if a message is spam is presented. A framework invokes anti-spam filters to analyze the message and return confidence levels of whether a message is spam. The framework evaluates the highest confidence level against a set of defined thresholds. If the highest confidence level is greater than the highest threshold set by the administrator, the action specified for the highest threshold is taken. The highest confidence level is also compared against all thresholds and the action associated with the nearest threshold that has been exceeded is taken.