The disclosure describes systems and methods for determining spam. A spam detecting system identifies potential spam messages by checking the relationship between a sender of a message and a recipient of the message. The spam detecting system identifies the relationship between the sender and recipient as ‘unknown’ or ‘trusted’. If the message is ‘trusted’, the message is transmitted accordingly to the recipient. If the message is classified as ‘unknown’, then the message is analyzed in view of other identified potential spam messages where a count is tallied against a threshold value to keep track of the probability a message is spam.