Method and system to analyze email addresses
AssigneeApp Tsunami, Inc.
InventorsStephen Chan, Edbert Chan
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
Website and newsletter operators may only have users' email addresses but not their person names. It can be beneficial for such operators to derive additional information about the email address owners so they can improve their services. However, there is no easy way to retrieve owners' information based on only email addresses. The present disclosure provides information such as the owners' names, professional profiles and aggregated statistics with only a list of email addresses as the input.
Claims19
A method for analyzing an email address, comprising:
- (a) isolating the user name from the email address;
- (b) extracting one or more strings from the user name which, in combination, represent a candidate full name of the owner of the email address;
- (c) comparing each of the one or more strings to a table comprising a plurality of real world name components and, for each real world name component, a use frequency, thereby obtaining a use frequency for each string;
- (d) calculating a likelihood score for the candidate full name to be a real world full name, which calculation takes the use frequencies obtained from step (c) as input;
- (e) repeating steps (b)-(d) to generate likelihood scores for a plurality of candidate full names each as a combination of different strings obtained by extracting one or more different strings from the user name;
- and
- (f) identifying the candidate full name, from the plurality of candidate full names, that has the highest likelihood score as an approximate full name of the owner of the email address,
- wherein at least one of steps (a)-(f) is performed by a computer.
A computer system comprising a processor, memory and program code which when executed, configures the system to:
- (a) isolate the user name from the email address;
- (b) extract one or more strings from the user name which, in combination, represent a candidate full name of the owner of the email address;
- (c) compare each of the two or more strings to a table comprising a plurality of real world name components and, for each real world name component, a use frequency, thereby obtaining a use frequency for each string;
- (d) calculate a likelihood score for the candidate full name to be a real world full name, which calculation takes the use frequencies obtained from step (c) as input;
- (e) repeat steps (b)-(d) to generate likelihood scores for a plurality of candidate full names each as a combination of different strings obtained by extracting one or more different strings from the user name;
- and
- (f) identify the candidate full name, from the plurality of candidate full names, that has the highest likelihood score as an approximate full name of the owner of the email address.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.