Slashdot Mirror
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."
Without going into all the IP crap, this kind of makes sense in the days of free email accounts with limited quotas.
:)
However, what would be even better is if Hotmail et. al provided you with an overflow email address that gets your hotmail mail when your quota is full.
The ability to get your old/dead mail accounts forwarded to a new account is OK, but a quiet word to your SA in the job you are leaving is cheaper
http://pcblues.com - Digits and Wood
From my reading of the press release, they're looking to start a registry for old email address to new email address translation, in order to handle bounce messages more cleanly.
Doesn't seem very useful to me. Just adds another layer on top of SMTP that fits a tiny niche. And this layer is dependent on some random startup still being in business.
Maybe some kind of distributed delivery system, with encryption of bounced messages...
OK, here's my solution to their problem. All email is signed, and the recipient's public PGP or GPG key is sent with the message. If the message bounces, it gets sent to usenet. The recipient scans usenet for their PGP or GPG key. If they come across it, then the message gets delivered to them. This method has a problem dealing with spam, especially since the disk space cost and bandwidth cost increases dramatically for each bounce.
The spam problem could be solved by limiting the number of bounced messages that can be sent from one host (NNTP-Posting-Host:, or even Path:), but that's only a partial solution.
The classic dictionary attack - sending mail to ajones@, bjones@, cjones@ - has evolved somewhat. These days, some spammers take every valid @aol.com address and try to mail it @hotmail.com. They take every valid @hotmail.com address and try to mail it @yahoo.com. Reason being, a substantial number of people carry the same username across services. If JimBob4494@aol.com creates a Hotmail account, it's likely to be jimbob4494@hotmail.com. If joeuser555@hotmail.com signs up for Yahoo! Mail, he's likely to create joeuser555@yahoo.com.
So, what's more likely in the case of rezrov {at} hotmail {dot} com is that there's a valid user with the address rezrov@aol.com or rezrov@yahoo.com. So one spammer decided to try that particular user portion @hotmail.com, it didn't bounce, and now you're on tens if not hundreds of lists. Meanwhile, there was never a aimfiz69105@aol.com, or a aimfiz69105@yahoo.com, etc so that address @hotmail doesn't get any spam.
Sucks, eh?
My Hotmail/Yahoo account method has been spamproof so far:
Pull a dollar bill out of your pocket, and use its serial number as your free webmail account username. Guaranteed no spam, ever.
Right now I'm looking at a dollar bill whose serial number is J57097854N (I need to go put it into WheresGeorge
And how exactly non-obvious invention is it? How many minutes it would take for any e-mail systems veteran to come up with the answer to the question "How do I forward mail to someone who moved from one system to another without involving the original server? We have custom client you can change, btw...". 1 minute? 5? It sure did not take me any longer. And I was asked this question by a client years back. News flash! There are already centralized mail directories on the net using LDAP! BigFoot anyone? Yahoo? People Find? If someone wants this useless service, one could theoretically set up an LDAP directory with name, old and new email address and get any EXISTING client with LDAP support (netscape, outlook, eudora etc etc) to look up (although not automatically - I am sure the 5 mouse clicks now required can be programmed by any kid with Visual Basic). This would require of course for people to update their entires on this LDAP server and some sort of authentication/billing system but this is really some PHP trivia. OBVIOUS, INEVITABLE AND NOT VERY PRACTICAL SOLUTION to this silly question (my client decided it was too much hassle - and I agreed).
This proves one thing: UPO certainly does NOT do ANY peer or expert review on the patents. They just make sure that you have your fees in order and the forms are properly filled. It is truly a travesty.
Agreed, that's easy, it's a simple redirect or alias on the previous email that is resident on their system. However. that is *not* what the patent is for (although admittedly that's what it sounded like before a read the abstract). The first line of the abstract states, "Systems and methods for automatically determining if the recipient of electronic mail that is unknown at the receiving server has left a "forwarding address" with a forwarding address server", which is significantly harder than setting up an alias on your own server. Also, this patent explicitly requires the use of a separate "forwarding address server" for them to be able to cry foul on someone else. While the idea itself is redundant, at least this patent seems somewhat unenforceable, as I can't imagine that populating one central database of bogus and their corresponding new addresses would prove feasible.
--- What
I would advise a little research into the money behind this company. IMHO, some of it will be from spammers. Even if the company is squeaky clean, you can bet it will be a target of spammers. They may pay for access to the database or just crack it.
Think of it... This is a spammers wet dream. A list of dead addresses to take out of the mill (or add to it if you charge by number of addresses sent) and a list of good addresses. AND, they charge you $20 for the privilege of updating their database.
It's late in the discussion, but here I go....
:-) (to google...)
Back when I was a poor college student and PSU (The Pennsylvania State University) I remember a professor of mine in an algorithms class talk about the problem of searching a patent database. I forget all the figures, and who this professor was, and all the other important details, but I do remember he said that it was an extremely hard problem, to the point where PSU told the USPTO that it was impossible, because there was no way you could sustain the search at the rate patents were being submitted. It was something like, to do 1 keyword search (nothing fancy) it would take say an hour to do (I forget the numbers, like I said) at the time patents were rolling in at something much higher, like 200/hr or something alot higher than you would think.
So basically the long short of this garbled mess of memories is to do a really good search using all kinds of fancy algorithms and stuff on the full patent database would never work since there are too many patents to search, especially at the rate they are coming in.
And before you say "hardware has gotten a lot faster" remember this was brought up in an alorithm class, so it is doubtful that hardware has caught up to the rate they need. I really need to find a link to this problem so I can be a little more intelligent about this post.