US 8,413,059 B2Granted

Image based electronic mail system

AssigneeSocial Concepts, Inc.

InventorsJoseph William Lee, Michael R. Hedlund, Peter August Grendler

Life of this patent

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Abstract

An image based email system associates images with different electronic mail (email) senders. The email system receives email messages from different email senders and then looks through either website member profiles or user contacts for associated images. Any located image is displayed in a list of recent senders. This allows the email user to associate recently received email messages with particular sender images or photographs. The images can also be used in a list of favorite or most frequent email senders. Other features of the email system extract information from received email messages to better identify the email senders. These and other features of the email system provide more intuitive and easier to perform email operations.

Claims37

Dependent claims

A method, comprising:

storing in a database on a network a plurality of profiles each corresponding to a respective member of a social networking website, wherein each profile specifies at least contact information for its respective social networking website member and an image selected by its respective social networking website member;
after said storing, receiving, at a network device, an email originating from a user terminal remote from the network device;
processing the received email to enable an addressee of the email to display at least a portion of the email on a user terminal operated by the addressee;
comparing a sender email address of the received email to the database to identify a corresponding one of the profiles;
and
responsive to identifying the corresponding one of the profiles, causing the image of the corresponding one of the profiles to be displayed by the user terminal operated by the addressee concurrently with the displayed email portion.

3 more elements

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.

Facts

Application: 11/619,520Filed 3 Jan 2007
Published: US 2008/0162649 A13 Jul 2008
Granted: 2 Apr 2013
Term ends: Not estimatedThe source records don’t support an estimate.

Classification4 codes

H04L 51/52
User-to-user messaging in packet-switching networks, transmitted according to store-and-forward or real-time protocols, e.g. e-mail: for…
G06Q 10/107
Office automation; Time management: computer-aided management of electronic mailing [e-mailing]
H04L
Digital communication
G06Q
Information and communication technology [ict] specially adapted for administrative, commercial, financial, managerial