If they actually go through with this patent, it will be completely useless in the court room. I think the goal is simply to discourage young entrepreneurs. It's supposed to be impossible to get a patent for something which is indistinguishable from the current state of the art. Thus if Yahoo gets this patent, it'll be because their lawyers managed to pull the wool over sombody's eyes, and they'll never be able to collect money from anybody currently using this technology (/. for example, or any one of the sites I've been building lately).
I remember Carmack talking about lack of an easy-to-use email program under Linux a few months back, and he is... 100% right.
I think this is a feeling that comes from being used to a certain email program on another platform. Personally I can't stand bloatware like Outlook. I have used Netscape, Outlook, Eudora and a several others and by far the most efficient, productive email program for me is Pine! It's fast and light, never crashes, and most importantly it never gets in my way.
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That's what encrypted filesystems are for:
http://www.kerneli.org/lo opback-encrypted-filesystem.html
If they actually go through with this patent, it will be completely useless in the court room. I think the goal is simply to discourage young entrepreneurs. It's supposed to be impossible to get a patent for something which is indistinguishable from the current state of the art. Thus if Yahoo gets this patent, it'll be because their lawyers managed to pull the wool over sombody's eyes, and they'll never be able to collect money from anybody currently using this technology (/. for example, or any one of the sites I've been building lately).