US 2019/0319905 A1Published application

Mail protection system

AssigneeInky Technology Corporation

InventorsDavid M. Baggett, Andrew B. Goldberg

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Abstract

A system for characterizing email communications. Mail is first processed by a Sending Entity Identifier (SEI), to determine which person, company, or type of sender the mail appears to be from, answering the question “What entity would a typical human conclude this email is from”? The output of the SEI will typically be a person (“John Doe”) or a brand (“Amazon”). The SEI passes that information, along with the email itself, to a Sending Entity Verifier (SEV), to verify whether the email really is from the entity the SEI says it's from. A Markup Engine may add a human-readable banner and/or machine-readable headers and then pass the email to a Disposition Engine which may deliver, quarantine, or folder the email (e.g., to a Junk Folder) accordingly.

Claims11

Dependent claims

An automated method for determining if an email is a forgery comprising:

A. programmatically identifying who an apparent sender of the email is visually perceived to be by a human, by at least one of:
determining if the apparent sender is associated with a brand by the steps of:
when a hyperlink or domain name is found in the email;
tokenizing the hyperlink and/or domain name to provide a token;
matching the token against a list of brand names;
when an image is found in the email;
optionally segmenting the image to provide an image segment;
matching the image or an image segment against a list of brand name images;
when there is prominent text found in the email;
matching the prominent text against a list of brand names;
determining if the apparent sender is an individual by:
maintaining a social graph using a to:
and from:
and/or cc:
fields in received emails;
and
matching the to:
field in the email against the graph of received emails
B. determining an actual sender of the email by the steps of:
when the apparent sender is a brand;
comparing one or more attributes of a digital signature of the email using a sender domain authentication protocol;
when the apparent sender is a person;
using one or more heuristics including one or more of
trust on first use;
matching the apparent sender against the social graph;
and
C. determining the email is a forgery if the apparent sender does not match the actual sender.

24 more elements

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.