Looking for other opinions on approach to classification problem
You should use text classification techniques. The most basic one is multinomial naive Bayes classifier with tf-idf features. for this method, take a look at this:
https://scikit-learn.org/stable/tutorial/text_analytics/working_with_text_data.html

If you don’t get enough accuracy (or maybe precision, recall or f-score), you could test more complex techniques e.g. using deep LSTM networks with word embedding. For this method, take a look at this:
https://machinelearningmastery.com/use-word-embedding-layers-deep-learning-keras/