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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."

1 of 165 comments (clear)

  1. From my reading by flonker · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.