TERA: A Trade-Off Evaluation and Resource-Aware Framework for Spam and Phishing Email Detection

Email spam and phishing detection is typically evaluated using accuracy-centric metrics under implicitly unconstrained computational settings. However, in practical deployment scenarios—particularly in real-time and resource-constrained environments—models with comparable predictive performance may differ substantially in inference latency and resource usage, directly affecting their operational feasibility. This paper introduces TERA, a deployment-aware evaluation framework that formulates model assessment as a constraint-aware decision problem. Instead of aggregating performance and efficiency into a single objective, TERA treats predictive performance as a feasibility requirement that defines an admissible set of models. Within this feasible region, operational factors such as latency and resource usage are used to differentiate among candidates through structured, multi-dimensional analysis. Experiments on benchmark email datasets show that multiple models achieve comparable detection performance, forming a region of predictive equivalence. Within this region, significant variations in latency and resource consumption are observed, indicating that predictive equivalence does not imply deployment equivalence. These findings demonstrate that accuracy-based evaluation alone may provide limited guidance for deployment-oriented model selection. By explicitly separating feasibility constraints from preference-based trade-offs, TERA enables transparent and deployment-aligned model evaluation. The framework supports consistent comparison and selection among accuracy-comparable models without altering the role of detection effectiveness as a primary requirement, thereby complementing existing evaluation practices with a structured decision-oriented perspective.