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

They are almost saints

[jukal]

"All the software will be free and hopefully, open-source. Only the registration will be charged, and given the scale that we anticipate, we're looking at less than US$20 per year, with substantial discounts for students, etc."

Now we have someone to continue Mother Teresa's work!

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

[John Miles]

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.

They don't sign you up for spam lists. Try creating your Hotmail account name with a random-sounding combination of several letters that don't spell any valid English words or proper names and numbers that don't look like a year in the 20th century. As long as the address is kept private, it won't be spammed.

"aimfiz69105" at hotmail.com has received zero spams in the past couple of years.
"rezrov" at hotmail.com has received about 300 spams since it was created last week.

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.

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

[alexburke]

"aimfiz69105" at hotmail.com has received zero spams in the past couple of years.

Until about three minutes after you hit "Submit" and smacked your forehead. :P

Re:More Slashdot sensationalism

[WEFUNK]

Yes, software patents are bad, but this one isn't as bad as the article makes it out to be .... it doesn't come anywhere near patenting traditional email forwarding.

I think this type of patent is actually much worse than the kind that might have allowed traditional email forwarding to be patented. This patent is very typical of what makes most software patents so bad. The vast majority of software patents that make it to the front page of slashdot seem to have the exact same "M.O." or recipe. Most seem to describe obvious examples of using a database to store information, relate information, and then perform an automated action based on the linked information.

None of the component actions are ever really innovative or are even claimed to be (forwarding e-mail for instance). Instead, these patents claim that by using a database to automate a common or obvious process they are proposing a new and innovative solution. Other bad patents simply claim that using networks or the internet with existing processes achieves the same goal.

I think the examiners wrongly treat these patents like non-software patents that combine two or more existing elements or technologies in a new way that produces unobvious results. The difference is that software patents whose main innovation is the use of a database (or a network) are not only comprised of existing and obvious elements but they are also being combined in an existing and very obvious way. Databases are specifically designed to store and relate information and to allow for automated actions to be performed. Pre-existing elements using a pre-existing architecture or application should not so easily be classified as either novel or unobvious.

Re:Postfix lets you do this

[srw]

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.)

From my reading

[flonker]

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.

not exactly e-mail forwarding...

[jdbo]

...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.

It's not that bad: read the actual patent

[jon_eaves]

It's not click and forward, or "f" and forward or even ".forward" and forward.

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.

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?