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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."
Now we have someone to continue Mother Teresa's work!
- User sends out email to an innactive/delted account.
- Mail gets bounced back to user.
- 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"
- 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.
I wonder just who is going to get the patent on patenting things, and then satrt suing everyone? Or did someone already get that too? Leave it to the lawyers... We already know IBM beat you to it...
US Patent on Using the Bathroom by IBM
"Hollowpoints: When you care enough to send the very best."
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?
What we see depends on mainly what we look for. -- John Lubbock Now search for that bug slave!
Have you read the patent? The patent refers to a system where a mailserver which receives an email for an address no longer in use checks with _another_ server to determine the new address. Does Postfix do this? It doesn't seem all that useful to me, and possibly exploitable. (...my old scott.walde@sasknet.sk.ca doesn't work anymore. What's to stop someone else from registering a forward for that address to their own address and diverting mail that was intended for me. I haven't read the patent all the way through, so forgive me if they have thought of this.)
* Patent on automatic forwarding from URL to another
* Patent on "Out of Office" autoreplies
Actually, I wouldn't mind this last one. Hopefully people would stop using them.
Mart.
Martin Brooks / Slayer99 #linux / UIN 2178117
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.
...rather, this looks like some sort of (centralized) email-address registry which can be accessed by e-mail clients/servers to look for a more recent version of an out-of-date e-mail address.
in other words, this is little more than an internet-based look-up table of e-mail addresses (with obsolete addresses pointing to the most recent address) + protocols for accessing that look-up table.
in my (admittedly cursory) of the patent, it doesn't seem to overlap with server-specific e-mail forwarding (i.e. what is normally done with e-mail forwarding). this isn't to say that this isn't a silly/sleazy patent, but rather that this won't necessarily interfere with how people currently handle e-mail forwarding (if someone sees an element of overlap that I am missing, please point it out!).
Not that any of this is clear from the write-up, of course; sometimes I wish that passing reading comprehension and composition courses was mandatory for internet usage... then I think again, because ninjas are awesome.
"...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
From the patent link A method of automatically resending an electronic message originally sent to a receiving user at a first address that is now invalid to a second address for the receiving user, wherein the second address has been registered with a forwarding address server
It's very specifically related to dealing with bouncing mail and having a registry set up for when the bounce occurs stuff can happen to get the mail to the right place.
Of course, I see a huge gaping security hole in this if I register the bounce address as mine.
Yet another case of great editor review of stories. What's with the inflammatory headlines ? Clearly the person submitting the story didn't even read the article.
Sorry, it's already been done :-), by Microsoft, of course.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Copy the business concept from here.
Mail forwarding for first class mail is free in the U.S. Magazines have a slight charge to them.
-- Will program for bandwidth
Yeah.
Then I can sign up for a HotMail account, set an "overflow" address, and then send it crap until it turns into a pure forwarding address, after which I never, ever log into HitMail, ever again.
I'm sure they'll really go for that idea:
1) They get to pay to store as much useless crap as it takes to push the account over quota
2) They don't get to sell my eyeballs to advertisers.
3) ???
4) Profit!!!
-- Terry
It's sort of free in the U.S.
If you start mail forwarding with one of those "Movers Guide" pamphlets, you pay for the service in the junk mail that gets sent to you. Read the back, that book is provided by the Direct Marketer's Association or some such thing. The info you supply is given directly to them as an "opt-in" for junk mail.
This centralized server idea mentioned in the patent will cause spam in one of two ways:
The owners will sell spammers access to the list, or perform mailings for them
Someone will hack the sytem and download all the addresses
Of course by the simple nature of the thing, a simple bot that generates random queries would eventually get you a lot of addresses across many domains. Imagine just sending it millions of queries for random screen names on AOL. MSN and the other major ISPs.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
It goes something like this:
This is of course slightly different to BT's hyperlink patent, which is more along the lines of:
Personally, I think the patent offices should have a moderation system. I'd vote this one down (-1, File an RFC).
Yeah, and I'm going to patent the idea of making stupid jokes about patenting something bleedingly obvious on Slashdot every time the editors post a story like this
:)
Yeah umm..I think the trolls have PRIOR ART on that one
I would guess that you'd only be able to register the 2 email addresses while you still had access to both (to prove ownership...or at least access).
Finland Post Corporation does this too, but if you move to a new address, they'll automatically redirect your mail mail sent to old address to this new address for 6 months for free. Pretty neat. For about $13 you can extend this period to one year.
Take a current idea that's obvious to anyone.
Including an idea which has been around for a long time. Wonder if the USPO checks against expired and refused patents in their prior art search...
Patent it with 18 extra claims that limit scope.
In the process try and stick as much jargon and obscure language in the application and refer to new machines and systems.
There is even a term to describe this, "patent fraud".
Actually...I've had several ISPs do this very thing for me on several occasions.
Derek Greene
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
yes, they do, but you forgot the magic words that make anything patentable: "on a computer"
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
All patents bad! Must post misleading headline! Need page hits!
slashdot!=valid HTML
Of course, I see a huge gaping security hole in this if I register the bounce address as mine
Let's see... you know someone who gets canned at work, or maybe who has forgotten to pay their internet bill and was suspended from their service, or has died, or something. Quickly, you set up a webmail account and tell this service that you're the owner of those accounts. Now you're getting all of their mail!
Get off my launchpad!
My recent patent application can be summarized thusly:
"Bipedal motion, in which Ped One (1) is thrust in the direction of desired travel, followed by the retrieval and, if necessary, forward thrusting of Ped Two (2)."
ph3@r.
I just submitted a patent for this new thing I've created. It's a round flat thing that I call (my best Doctor Evil finger quotes immitation) "a wheel." As far as I can tell, there is no prior art on this concept, but it's my contention that two or more of these "wheels", when connected by a post of some sort, that I call "an axle" (patent pending), can be used to make it easier to move a load from one location to another.
I don't know why nobody thought of this before.
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
I think someone already did patent posting... wasn't there an article about a patent on HTML forms a while back?
Doesn't the USPO already do this? Don't they have claim to prior art.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
there is tax for this service
That would be the 'S' in GST.
My guess is that the problem is that Hotmail and other mail providers are apparently stupid enough to accept incoming mail with 300,000,000 recipients in the header. I can't think of any other reason why "rezrov" would get buried in spam almost instantly while "aimfiz69105" never gets any.
The problem is that Hotmail is so stupid that that they apparently have no software to block mailers that are guessing addresses. If a mailer is is bouncing BCC'd messages at a rate greater than 90%, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that the sender is probably a spammer. Hotmail's software should temporarily block the sending IP and automatically inform the owner of the problem. If the contact info is bad, tough. Let them wait a week/month/etc. until the block expires.
Isn't this what happens when you send an email to your ISP and it FORWARDS that email to the next system and so on? This is called relaying or something.
HELO slashdot
MAIL FROM me
RCPT TO someone@uspto.gov
DATA
Date: today
From: me
To: someone@uspto.gov
Subject: your a bunch of idiots
Need I say more?
.
QUIT
Hmm wont this get 'relayed' / 'forwarded' to them ???
Gotta hate tech unaware people...
Only 'flamers' flame!
When was .forward first used? This is getting even sillier. PTO should be renamed Ministry Of Silly Ideas (ala Monty Python).
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.
Since when can you do Email without a computer, anyway?
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"