US 7,627,641 B2Granted

Method and system for recognizing desired email

AssigneeWatchGuard Technologies, Inc.

InventorsJohn Aslop, Christopher Gabe, Robert Osborne

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Abstract

A system and method for recognizing an incoming email as a desired email examines outgoing email messages to arrange the email into fragments for which representations are created and stored. When an incoming message is received, the message is arranged into fragments for which representations are created. The representations of the incoming message are compared to the stored representations and if the matches between stored representations and the representations of the incoming message meet a predefined threshold test, the incoming message is recognized as being desirable. An incoming email message which has been recognized as being desirable can be subjected to a lesser examination to recognize a SPAM message, or to no further examination to recognize a SPAM message.

Claims14

Dependent claims

A computer-implemented method of recognizing an incoming email message as being desired, the method comprising:

in at least one email server, arranging contents of an outgoing email message into at least one outgoing email message fragment;
in said at least one email server, for each outgoing email message fragment, creating an outgoing email message representation comprising at least a portion of contents of the outgoing email message fragment;
storing, in said at least one email server, each created outgoing email message representation;
in said at least one email server, arranging contents of an incoming email message into at least one incoming email message fragment;
in said at least one email server, for at least one incoming email message fragment, creating an incoming email message representation comprising at least a portion of contents of the incoming email message fragment;
in said at least one email server, comparing each incoming email message representation to each outgoing email message representation to identify matches therebetween;
and
in said at least one email server, identifying the incoming email message as being desired if the matches identified meet a pre-defined threshold test.

5 more elements

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.