An intelligent system for spam detection and identification of the most relevant features based on evolutionary Random Weight Networks

•In this paper, an evolvable and adaptable spam detection models is proposed.•The proposed system is based on Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Random Weight Network (RWN).• The systemautomaticly identifies the relevant features for classifying spam emails.•Extensive experiments based on three email corpora were conducted to evaluate the proposed system.•A superior performance of the proposed approaches is proved in the experiments.