E-Mail Forwarding Patented, PTO Sued

David Lee Ludwig writes "Earlier today, I ran across an article regarding an issued patent on e-mail forwarding. According to the president of the holding company, they're interested in making the technology open-source, however I fail to see where the innovation is. The full text of the patent (6427164) is available online." Sadly, we've run altogether too many patent stories of late. In related news, the PTO has been sued to stop shredding the original documents related to the patents. Read on for more on that... mgarraha writes "A Washington Post article reports that the National Intellectual Property Researchers Association is suing the US Patent and Trademark Office to stop them from destroying their archive of paper documents. NIPRA claims that PTO's new patent database is not good enough to go completely paperless. PTO had planned to begin disposal today, but they are still negotiating with the group that will take the paper off their hands."

Comments

More Slashdot sensationalism

[khym]

Yes, software patents are bad, but this one isn't as bad as the article makes it out to be. Here's what's patented:

1. User sends out email to an innactive/delted account.
2. Mail gets bounced back to user.
3. User's email-agent notices the bounce is of a certain type, so it connects to a central machine and asks "for non-working address foo@bar.com, give me an active address for the same perrson"
4. Email-agent forward the bounced mail to that active adress.

So it doesn't come anywhere near patenting traditional email forwarding.

Re:More Slashdot sensationalism

[Com2Kid]

For kicks, create a hotmail account, in your preferences don't set it to sign up to any mailing lists...Wait a week and login, it will be flooded with spam (much of which the 'bulk/spam email detector' missed) even if your userid is something random and unguessable.


my hotmail account (hey hey hey backoff, it came with the damn MSIM messenger account!!! Err, wait, you mean that isn't any better? Oh darn. . . :-D ) has received all of four or five pieces of e-mail.

Ever.

Period.

The first one the customary "welcome to hotmail.com" e-mail, and the rest of them asking me to upgrade to the premium service.

Not one piece of spam.

Ever.

So nyah! (well over a month to!)

Re:More Slashdot sensationalism

[Twylite]

The SMTP protocol includes two 3xx response codes; one is "address not local, forward to remote@address" (client agent must handle forwarding), the other is "address not local, will forward to remote@address" (server will do the forwarding).

Re:More Slashdot sensationalism

[ProfBooty]

this deals with an INACTIVE address
read claim 12
12. A method of automatically resending an electronic message originally sent to a receiving user at a destination address that is now invalid to a new address for the receiving user, wherein the new address has been registered with an address server, the method comprising the steps of:

a) creating an electronic message on a computer system, the electronic message having a first destination address;

b) sending the electronic message to a first server;

c) sending the electronic message from the first server to a second server associated with the destination address;

d) determining in the second server that the destination address is not valid; and thereafter

e) automatically sending a query to the address server to determine a new address associated with the destination address, wherein the address server stores the destination address in association with the new address;

f) returning the new address; and thereafter

g) automatically sending the electronic message to the new address.

Canada Post offers a similar regular mail service

[jpt.d]

Canada Post (along with probably every other post office type company) provides a change of address you can purchase which will redirect your mail for a specified period of time for a fee. It is the exact same thing as what I believe they are trying to do, only it is redirected a lot later in the process of delivery (after the bounce). Is this what we call prior art?

SENDMAIL: An Internetwork Mail Router (1985)

[jukal]

Ehmm. Great invention. Sorry to spoil the fun but .. :
"...MMDF and sendmail both support aliasing, customized mailers, message batching, automatic forwarding to gateways, queueing, and retransmission."

The orginal paper:
SENDMAIL -- An Internetwork Mail Router, Eric Allman

Re:not exactly e-mail forwarding...

[Greg Lindahl]

Claim 1 is exactly how the NIS aliases map + sendmail behaves...

Re:Canada Post offers a similar regular mail servi

[Anonymous Coward]

You guys are lucky. Canada Post charges a lot for the mail forwarding service. On top of that, there is tax for this service. :(

Prior art in RFC 821

[riflemann]

RFC821 includes almost exactly this patent (hopefully enough to quash it), especially
the 551 response:

3.2. FORWARDING

There are some cases where the destination information in the
<forward-path> is incorrect, but the receiver-SMTP knows the
correct destination. In such cases, one of the following replies
should be used to allow the sender to contact the correct
destination.

[...]
551 User not local; please try <forward-path>

This reply indicates that the receiver-SMTP knows the user's
mailbox is on another host and indicates the correct
forward-path to use. Note that either the host or user or
both may be different. The receiver refuses to accept mail
for this user, and the sender must either redirect the mail
according to the information provided or return an error
response to the originating user.

Or can the lawyers see holes in that?