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E-Mail Forwarding Patented, PTO Sued

Posted by chrisd on from the defining-a-new-bottom-of-that-barrel dept.

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."

3 of 165 comments (clear)

  1. More Slashdot sensationalism by khym · · Score: 5, Informative
    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.
    --
    Give a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day, but set him on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
    1. Re:More Slashdot sensationalism by Twylite · · Score: 5, Informative

      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).

      --
      i-name =twylite [http://public.xdi.org/=twylite], see idcommons.net
  2. Prior art in RFC 821 by riflemann · · Score: 4, Informative

    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?

    --
    Sparks:Gadget:Beer Maker