The proliferation of unsolicited short messages (SMS spam) poses persistent challenges to mobile communication security and user privacy. This study presents a systematic benchmarking and analytical investigation of classical machine learning approaches for SMS spam detection, focusing on the impact of text feature representation under imbalanced short-text conditions.In practical SMS filtering systems, minimizing false positives (i.e., incorrectly blocking legitimate messages) is a critical operational constraint. Therefore, beyond overall accuracy, precision and specificity are emphasized to ensure reliable preservation of legitimate communication. Using the SMSSpamCollection dataset (5574 messages: 747 spam and 4827 ham), seven feature representation techniques were evaluated in combination with six widely adopted classifiers, resulting in 42 configurations assessed under 10-fold cross-validation. The results demonstrate that feature representation plays a more critical role than classifier complexity. Character-level 3-grams combined with Logistic Regression achieved the best overall performance, reaching 98.55% accuracy, with 98.55% precision and 90.50% recall for the spam class (F1-score = 94.32%), and 0.9893 AUC. Linear SVM produced comparable results, highlighting the effectiveness of linear models when paired with expressive representations. Beyond reporting performance metrics, this study analyzes feature–classifier interaction patterns and clarifies practical trade-offs between precision, recall, and computational efficiency. The findings provide reproducible baselines and structured guidance for designing efficient SMS spam filtering systems.