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Interceptor for non-subscribed bulk electronic messages

Interceptor for non-subscribed bulk electronic messages description/claims

This is a continuation of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/636,986, agent docket number AUS920030379US1, filed on Aug. 7, 2003, by Jerry Walter Malcolm.

The related U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/636,986, agent docket number AUS920030379US1, filed on Aug. 7, 2003, by Jerry Walter Malcolm is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety, including figures.

This invention was not developed in conjunction with any Federally sponsored contract.

Not applicable.

1. Field of the Invention

This is a continuation of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/636,986, agent docket number AUS920030379US1, filed on Aug. 7, 2003, by Jerry Walter Malcolm. This invention relates to the fields of filtering, sorting, prioritizing and rejecting electronic messages such as e-mail.

2. Background of the Invention

Bulk electronic messaging such as mass mailings of electronic newsletters, advertisements, business announcements, etc., can be categorized from a recipient's viewpoint as “solicited” and “unsolicited”. Solicited messages are messages which the recipient expects or has requested to be sent, such as subscription information services, news alerts, etc. A recipient of these messages has usually registered for the messages, such as having been added to an “opt-in” mailing list.

Unsolicited messages are messages which the recipient has not requested, but which have been sent to the recipient by a source which may or may not be known to the recipient, such as advertisements, scam messages, promotional messages, etc.

“Spam” is an inexact term used by system operators, bulk mail senders (e.g. authors), and recipients, alike. It generally refers to messages which are sent in bulk (e.g. many recipients for the same message), and which is undesirable. Depending on the recipient's view of the message itself, it may or many not be “spam”. For example, consider that an online book seller provides each user of its e-commerce website the option to be sent messages about “special offers” and from “selected partners”. For one particular user, if messages for such “special” offers are received daily or even multiple times per day, the recipient may consider the messages “spam”, even though he or she elected to be part of the mailing list. In another example, the recipient may consider a message to be “spam” from a travel company associated with the book seller (e.g. a “selected partner”) because he or she did not expect to receive any messages other than book-related messages, while another recipient in the mailing list may appreciate the contact with the travel company.

So, depending on the content of the message, the historical context under which a message is sent from an author to a recipient, and the perspective of the recipient, a bulk mail message may or may not be considered “spam”.

FIG. 1 illustrates in general a bulk mailing arrangement (10), such as bulk email processes. A number of intended or targeted recipients (14) are interconnected to a source or sender (12) via a computer network (11). In the most common case of bulk electronic messaging, the sending server (12) is a Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (“SMTP”) server, the computer network (11) is the Internet, the receiving servers (13a, 13b, and 13c) are Post Office Protocol (“POP”) servers, and the recipients are email terminals (e.g. personal computers, personal digital assistants, web-enabled wireless telephones, etc.) having unique email addresses. Other arrangements may use other protocols and equipment such as the Short Message Server (“SMS”) used by many cellular telephones, text pagers, proprietary messaging schemes, and even facsimile transmissions.

In this arrangement, the sending server (12) accesses one or more mailing lists (15) which contains addresses of recipients (14) to which a particular bulk mail message is to be sent. In some cases, the mailing lists (15) may be sophisticated database entries for each possible recipient, including information about that recipient to help determine if the message should be sent or not (e.g. user's interests, key words, subjects, etc.). In other cases, the mailing list may be as simple as a list of email addresses, all of which are sent every bulk mail message.

The sending server (12) then composes a single message designating multiple recipients, or multiple messages each of which designates a single recipient from the mailing list. The message(s) are then transmitted via the computer network (11) to one or more receiving servers (13a, 13b, 13c), ultimately for delivery to the intended recipients (14).

Some spam filters have been brought to the market to help solve this problem in recent years. The general approach has been to detect a pattern that identifies a message as spam. Some spam filters “execute” or run at the receiving server's point in the process, using the ability to survey across multiple user's mailboxes to look for certain patterns, as well as being able to look at messages in individual mailboxes for patterns and to apply each user's specific preferences. Other filters run on the recipient's device, such as within the user's PC or PDA, blocking display or download of certain messages based upon various factors.

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