Short message communication media, such as mobile and microblogging social networks, have become attractive platforms for spammers to disseminate unsolicited contents. However, the traditional content-based methods for spam detection degraded in performance due to many factors. For instance, unlike the contents posted on social networks like Facebook and Renren, SMS and microblogging messages have limited size with the presence of many domain specific words, such as idioms and abbreviations. In addition, microblogging messages are very unstructured and noisy. These distinguished characteristics posed challenges to existing email spam detection models for effective spam identification in short message communication media. The state-of-the-art solutions for social spam accounts detection have faced different evasion tactics in the hands of intelligent spammers. In this paper, a unified framework is proposed for both spam message and spam account detection tasks. We utilized four datasets in this study, two of which are from SMS spam message domain and the remaining two from Twitter microblog. To identify a minimal number of features for spam account detection on Twitter, this paper studied bio-inspired evolutionary search method. Using evolutionary search algorithm, a compact model for spam account detection is proposed, which is incorporated in the machine learning phase of the unified framework. The results of the various experiments conducted indicate that the proposed framework is promising for detecting both spam message and spam account with a minimal number of features. © 2017, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.