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E-Mail Forwarding Patented, PTO Sued 213

Posted by chrisd from the defining-a-new-bottom-of-that-barrel dept.
David Lee Ludwig writes "Earlier today, I ran across an article regarding an issued patent on e-mail forwarding. According to the president of the holding company, they're interested in making the technology open-source, however I fail to see where the innovation is. The full text of the patent (6427164) is available online." Sadly, we've run altogether too many patent stories of late. In related news, the PTO has been sued to stop shredding the original documents related to the patents. Read on for more on that...
mgarraha writes "A Washington Post article reports that the National Intellectual Property Researchers Association is suing the US Patent and Trademark Office to stop them from destroying their archive of paper documents. NIPRA claims that PTO's new patent database is not good enough to go completely paperless. PTO had planned to begin disposal today, but they are still negotiating with the group that will take the paper off their hands."
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E-Mail Forwarding Patented, PTO Sued More

E-Mail Forwarding Patented, PTO Sued

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  • They are almost saints (Score:5, Funny)

    by jukal ( 523582 ) on Tuesday August 27, 2002 @02:31AM (#4146754) Journal
    "All the software will be free and hopefully, open-source. Only the registration will be charged, and given the scale that we anticipate, we're looking at less than US$20 per year, with substantial discounts for students, etc."

    Now we have someone to continue Mother Teresa's work!

  • More Slashdot sensationalism (Score:5, Informative)

    by khym ( 117618 ) <`matt' `at' `nightrealms.com'> on Tuesday August 27, 2002 @02:42AM (#4146786)
    Yes, software patents are bad, but this one isn't as bad as the article makes it out to be. Here's what's patented:
    1. User sends out email to an innactive/delted account.
    2. Mail gets bounced back to user.
    3. User's email-agent notices the bounce is of a certain type, so it connects to a central machine and asks "for non-working address foo@bar.com, give me an active address for the same perrson"
    4. Email-agent forward the bounced mail to that active adress.
    So it doesn't come anywhere near patenting traditional email forwarding.
    • Without going into all the IP crap, this kind of makes sense in the days of free email accounts with limited quotas.

      However, what would be even better is if Hotmail et. al provided you with an overflow email address that gets your hotmail mail when your quota is full.

      The ability to get your old/dead mail accounts forwarded to a new account is OK, but a quiet word to your SA in the job you are leaving is cheaper :)

      • However, what would be even better is if Hotmail et. al provided you with an overflow email address that gets your hotmail mail when your quota is full.

        Yeah but then why would you register for their premium service? It actually almost seems like they sign you up to spam lists of purpose just to fill up your mailbox and get you over the small quota they have so you'll upgrade to premium... For kicks, create a hotmail account, in your preferences don't set it to sign up to any mailing lists...Wait a week and login, it will be flooded with spam (much of which the 'bulk/spam email detector' missed) even if your userid is something random and unguessable.

        I'm not singling out Hotmail on this either, Yahoo is the same way and I suspect other free email places are too though I've only used Hotmail and Yahoo myself.

        • For kicks, create a hotmail account, in your preferences don't set it to sign up to any mailing lists...Wait a week and login, it will be flooded with spam (much of which the 'bulk/spam email detector' missed) even if your userid is something random and unguessable.


          my hotmail account (hey hey hey backoff, it came with the damn MSIM messenger account!!! Err, wait, you mean that isn't any better? Oh darn. . . :-D ) has received all of four or five pieces of e-mail.

          Ever.

          Period.

          The first one the customary "welcome to hotmail.com" e-mail, and the rest of them asking me to upgrade to the premium service.

          Not one piece of spam.

          Ever.

          So nyah! (well over a month to!)
          • So nyah! (well over a month to!)
            Writer looking for greeting card publisher Inquire Within [netfirms.com].

            You should spend less time on your sig and more time on your spelling.
          • I think it may depend on when you initiated the hotmail account, too. Mine is about four years old, and got tons of spam from day one. (The address has NEVER been posted anywhere, and the username is two longish words smucked together, not something a straight-up dictionary attack would readily discover.)

        • Re:More Slashdot sensationalism (Score:4, Insightful)

          by John Miles ( 108215 ) on Tuesday August 27, 2002 @03:54AM (#4146974) Homepage Journal
          For kicks, create a hotmail account, in your preferences don't set it to sign up to any mailing lists...Wait a week and login, it will be flooded with spam (much of which the 'bulk/spam email detector' missed) even if your userid is something random and unguessable.

          They don't sign you up for spam lists. Try creating your Hotmail account name with a random-sounding combination of several letters that don't spell any valid English words or proper names and numbers that don't look like a year in the 20th century. As long as the address is kept private, it won't be spammed.

          "aimfiz69105" at hotmail.com has received zero spams in the past couple of years.
          "rezrov" at hotmail.com has received about 300 spams since it was created last week.

          My guess is that the problem is that Hotmail and other mail providers are apparently stupid enough to accept incoming mail with 300,000,000 recipients in the header. I can't think of any other reason why "rezrov" would get buried in spam almost instantly while "aimfiz69105" never gets any.
          • My guess is that the problem is that Hotmail and other mail providers are apparently stupid enough to accept incoming mail with 300,000,000 recipients in the header. I can't think of any other reason why "rezrov" would get buried in spam almost instantly while "aimfiz69105" never gets any.
            The problem is that "rezrov" is a shorter userid than "aimfiz69105," and there's probably a rezrov@ other domains aside from hotmail.com (like aol.com, or yahoo.com). That's probably about it.

            The classic dictionary attack - sending mail to ajones@, bjones@, cjones@ - has evolved somewhat. These days, some spammers take every valid @aol.com address and try to mail it @hotmail.com. They take every valid @hotmail.com address and try to mail it @yahoo.com. Reason being, a substantial number of people carry the same username across services. If JimBob4494@aol.com creates a Hotmail account, it's likely to be jimbob4494@hotmail.com. If joeuser555@hotmail.com signs up for Yahoo! Mail, he's likely to create joeuser555@yahoo.com.

            So, what's more likely in the case of rezrov {at} hotmail {dot} com is that there's a valid user with the address rezrov@aol.com or rezrov@yahoo.com. So one spammer decided to try that particular user portion @hotmail.com, it didn't bounce, and now you're on tens if not hundreds of lists. Meanwhile, there was never a aimfiz69105@aol.com, or a aimfiz69105@yahoo.com, etc so that address @hotmail doesn't get any spam.

            Sucks, eh?

            My Hotmail/Yahoo account method has been spamproof so far:

            Pull a dollar bill out of your pocket, and use its serial number as your free webmail account username. Guaranteed no spam, ever.

            Right now I'm looking at a dollar bill whose serial number is J57097854N (I need to go put it into WheresGeorge :) and that would make a perfect Hotmail or Yahoo account.
          • aimfiz69105" at hotmail.com has received zero spams in the past couple of years.
            "rezrov" at hotmail.com has received about 300 spams since it was created last week.

            ibtgsrq@hotmail was created over 6 months ago. It regulary receives over 40 email spams a day despite having never signed up for anything, never opted for anything and never been published.

            It only takes one example to expose the flaw in your argument and I'm afriad thats it.

          • Re:More Slashdot sensationalism (Score:5, Funny)

            by alexburke ( 119254 ) <alex+slashdot@@@alexburke...ca> on Tuesday August 27, 2002 @07:45AM (#4147485)
            "aimfiz69105" at hotmail.com has received zero spams in the past couple of years.

            Until about three minutes after you hit "Submit" and smacked your forehead. :P
          • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Yeah.

        Then I can sign up for a HotMail account, set an "overflow" address, and then send it crap until it turns into a pure forwarding address, after which I never, ever log into HitMail, ever again.

        I'm sure they'll really go for that idea:

        1) They get to pay to store as much useless crap as it takes to push the account over quota

        2) They don't get to sell my eyeballs to advertisers.

        3) ???

        4) Profit!!!

        -- Terry
        • funny. i have been using hotmail for over a year however i have not seen a single banner ad, or even seen the website!

          MS Entourage (for mac)
          Outlook 2002 or Outlook Express 6 (for win32)

          Those programs allow you to use hotmail as if it were an IMAP service. No ads, no bullshit, just mail.
    • >So it doesn't come anywhere near patenting traditional email forwarding.

      The procedure you describe is traditional forwarding on some systems. For example, I once had a free GNN account (Global Network Navigator, AOL's "internet connection only" service that went under quickly). When GNN closed house, I was given the option to have everything forwarded to AOL for a period of time. All mail sent to me@gnn.com was forwarded to myotherID@aol.com. All web traffic destined to members.gnn.com/me was forwarded to members.aol.com/myotherID.

      So, "forwarding" can indeed mean what this patent applies to. Not forwarding as in "Fwd:" but forwarding as in automatic redirection of email to a different address; just like the USPS calls it "forwarding" when you move and they send your mail to your new home. Not everyone calls it aliasing, and in fact there are many webhosting companies out there right now who offer "email forwarding" which does exactly this.

      And yes, this patent sucks.
      • So far as I'm aware, traditional forwarding is done by the system the email was sent to. In the patented method, it is done by the user's mail agent; all the system the email was originally sent to does is bounce it back to the sender.
      • The procedure you describe is traditional forwarding on some systems.

        No it isn't.

        Traditional email forwarding works completely transparently to the client. You send your message, and it's delivered. The *server* handles any forwarding, *nothing* is returned to your client.

        The patented method is *different* - in that, the email server knows nothing about the forwarding address, it just bounces the undeliverable mail. The client then (automatically) discovers an address to forward to, from a different server.

        The only similarity is that the forwarding is automatic; the implementations are entirely different.

        The patent still sucks, though.

        Cheers,

        Tim
    • The thing is, this is NOT an innovation, it is merely an extension of what many people do already. My e-mail for the university of kansas has changed, but the old addresses were kept active and "forwarded" to my new address, essentially doing the same thing. the central server being my Universitys e-mail server, and the new address my new address. To move this system from the original institution is no change in technology, just a step in the same direction, it accomplishes the same goal in a slightly different way. It would be like patenting a joystick with 12 AXIS control, simply because you were the first to do it, then claiming that all controllers with 12 axis were under your patent, regardless of design.

      But alas, many of this kind of patent is in force today, especially in the computer industry, simply because of the money it takes to challenge the patents.
      • this deals with an INACTIVE address
        read claim 12
        12. A method of automatically resending an electronic message originally sent to a receiving user at a destination address that is now invalid to a new address for the receiving user, wherein the new address has been registered with an address server, the method comprising the steps of:

        a) creating an electronic message on a computer system, the electronic message having a first destination address;

        b) sending the electronic message to a first server;

        c) sending the electronic message from the first server to a second server associated with the destination address;

        d) determining in the second server that the destination address is not valid; and thereafter

        e) automatically sending a query to the address server to determine a new address associated with the destination address, wherein the address server stores the destination address in association with the new address;

        f) returning the new address; and thereafter

        g) automatically sending the electronic message to the new address.

    • How carefully did you read the patent? Your description doesn't match Claim 1. sendmail+NIS aliases does match claim 1 exactly. The server does the forwarding, not the client.

    • Agreed.

      While I'm not thrilled with the whole idea of patenting alogrithms, while they're legal, this really isn't an abusive of the system. It's not super-complicated, but then not every patent needs to be.

      I wouldn't mind these Editor Soapbox issues nearly as much if Timothy at least understood what he was posting half the time.

      -Bill

    • Re:More Slashdot sensationalism (Score:5, Informative)

      by Twylite ( 234238 ) <twylite&crypt,co,za> on Tuesday August 27, 2002 @05:17AM (#4147109) Homepage

      The SMTP protocol includes two 3xx response codes; one is "address not local, forward to remote@address" (client agent must handle forwarding), the other is "address not local, will forward to remote@address" (server will do the forwarding).

    • Except that it has been done before. Many Many times before.
    • Trust me: It won't work.

      Sometimes people send spams out with the "from" inside one of my domains. I get to see all the bounces. Trust me, there are too many of them to allow automatic detection of them all.It's even harder to find the original destination from the bounce.

      On the other hand, it is hard to get/keep the database populated: you need cooperation of the people who "move". If I know an address is going to stop working I can almost always get to install a forward.

      Now suppose this works, and my friends keep on mailing me on my old address, there is noone who will notice that they are using the old address until someone else grabs that address.

      For example, I could stop paying for say "Roger@Wolff.net", and that frees up that address for anybody to grab it. So it silently keeps on working until the second that someone else grabs my old email address, and the bounces stop coming....

      Roger.
    • Is this something you'd particularily want though?

      Very often people change email addresses so they're on one that the spammers don't have yet. Anyone you want to talk to can just send an email out saying you're changing your email address.

      Sure, people who get lots of emails from people they don't know might find it desirable, but I'm sure more often than not people with new email addresses don't want the spam from their old one flooding into their nice new account.
    • Whoever wrote the article for /. probably should have included a little more detail. Knowing the audience here, very few are going to read the article before jerking their knees.

    • Re:More Slashdot sensationalism (Score:5, Insightful)

      by WEFUNK ( 471506 ) on Tuesday August 27, 2002 @12:01PM (#4149020) Homepage
      Yes, software patents are bad, but this one isn't as bad as the article makes it out to be .... it doesn't come anywhere near patenting traditional email forwarding.

      I think this type of patent is actually much worse than the kind that might have allowed traditional email forwarding to be patented. This patent is very typical of what makes most software patents so bad. The vast majority of software patents that make it to the front page of slashdot seem to have the exact same "M.O." or recipe. Most seem to describe obvious examples of using a database to store information, relate information, and then perform an automated action based on the linked information.

      None of the component actions are ever really innovative or are even claimed to be (forwarding e-mail for instance). Instead, these patents claim that by using a database to automate a common or obvious process they are proposing a new and innovative solution. Other bad patents simply claim that using networks or the internet with existing processes achieves the same goal.

      I think the examiners wrongly treat these patents like non-software patents that combine two or more existing elements or technologies in a new way that produces unobvious results. The difference is that software patents whose main innovation is the use of a database (or a network) are not only comprised of existing and obvious elements but they are also being combined in an existing and very obvious way. Databases are specifically designed to store and relate information and to allow for automated actions to be performed. Pre-existing elements using a pre-existing architecture or application should not so easily be classified as either novel or unobvious.
      • Exactly. Let's go back the original justification for patents: to provide an incentive to invest in developing original new ideas which would otherwise lack profitability because they're easy for competitors to replicate once developed. This in turn supposedly provides society with inventions, like new drugs, that it otherwise wouldn't have been profitable to research and bring to market.

        So... this "innovation" certainly is easy to replicate, but as for originality - WTF? Are the PTO seriously trying to tell us that this "innovation" is so original that, if it hadn't been for patent incentives, no-one else would have thought of it?

      • Umm... If this patent is so obvious, why hasn't anyone thought of it before?

        Yes, the specific steps taken to implement this technology are simple. But, why should that prevent getting a patent? Say I invent a new mousetrap, the basic compopnents (levers, springs) have been used elsewhere, but I combine them into a new & unique design. By your reasoning, I should not be eligible for a patent.

        I am all for revising the patent system. There are numerous problems with it, and "obvious" patents are certainly one of them. But calling a patent obvious just because it uses obvious technologies in novel ways is very flawed reasoning. The test of obviousness should be the novelty of the overall task, not the steps taken to get there. On that ground, this seems to me to be a sound patent.

  • So.... (Score:3, Funny)

    by k0ala ( 199123 ) on Tuesday August 27, 2002 @02:44AM (#4146794) Homepage
    I wonder just who is going to get the patent on patenting things, and then satrt suing everyone? Or did someone already get that too? Leave it to the lawyers... We already know IBM beat you to it...

    US Patent on Using the Bathroom by IBM [uspto.gov]

  • Canada Post offers a similar regular mail service (Score:3, Informative)

    by jpt.d ( 444929 ) <abfall&rogers,com> on Tuesday August 27, 2002 @02:45AM (#4146800)
    Canada Post (along with probably every other post office type company) provides a change of address you can purchase which will redirect your mail for a specified period of time for a fee. It is the exact same thing as what I believe they are trying to do, only it is redirected a lot later in the process of delivery (after the bounce). Is this what we call prior art?
    • Mail forwarding for first class mail is free in the U.S. Magazines have a slight charge to them.
      • It's sort of free in the U.S.

        If you start mail forwarding with one of those "Movers Guide" pamphlets, you pay for the service in the junk mail that gets sent to you. Read the back, that book is provided by the Direct Marketer's Association or some such thing. The info you supply is given directly to them as an "opt-in" for junk mail.

        This centralized server idea mentioned in the patent will cause spam in one of two ways:
        The owners will sell spammers access to the list, or perform mailings for them
        Someone will hack the sytem and download all the addresses
        Of course by the simple nature of the thing, a simple bot that generates random queries would eventually get you a lot of addresses across many domains. Imagine just sending it millions of queries for random screen names on AOL. MSN and the other major ISPs.

    • Well, the patent doesn't cover this, since its limited to email where the forwarding server is a third party key => value (old email => new email) database, and where it's the client that decides to use it.

      It goes something like this:
      1. Take a current idea that's obvious to anyone.
      2. Patent it with 18 extra claims that limit scope.
      3. Profit!

      This is of course slightly different to BT's hyperlink patent, which is more along the lines of:
      1. Make some dodgy system and patent it in case it might be useful some day.
      2. Get upset when you notice you could have generalised the patent and covered something that could make you money if you could only get rid of some claims.
      3. Try to convince court that because of (2) the patent should cover the more general case anyway.
      4. Profit!

      Personally, I think the patent offices should have a moderation system. I'd vote this one down (-1, File an RFC).
      • Take a current idea that's obvious to anyone.

        Including an idea which has been around for a long time. Wonder if the USPO checks against expired and refused patents in their prior art search...

        Patent it with 18 extra claims that limit scope.

        In the process try and stick as much jargon and obscure language in the application and refer to new machines and systems.
        There is even a term to describe this, "patent fraud".
    • Finland Post Corporation [www.post.fi] does this too, but if you move to a new address, they'll automatically redirect your mail mail sent to old address to this new address for 6 months for free. Pretty neat. For about $13 you can extend this period to one year.

  • on next.... (Score:2, Funny)

    by slayer99 ( 15543 )

    * Patent on automatic forwarding from URL to another

    * Patent on "Out of Office" autoreplies

    Actually, I wouldn't mind this last one. Hopefully people would stop using them.

    Mart.

  • From my reading (Score:4, Interesting)

    by flonker ( 526111 ) on Tuesday August 27, 2002 @02:47AM (#4146809)
    From my reading of the press release, they're looking to start a registry for old email address to new email address translation, in order to handle bounce messages more cleanly.

    Doesn't seem very useful to me. Just adds another layer on top of SMTP that fits a tiny niche. And this layer is dependent on some random startup still being in business.

    Maybe some kind of distributed delivery system, with encryption of bounced messages...

    OK, here's my solution to their problem. All email is signed, and the recipient's public PGP or GPG key is sent with the message. If the message bounces, it gets sent to usenet. The recipient scans usenet for their PGP or GPG key. If they come across it, then the message gets delivered to them. This method has a problem dealing with spam, especially since the disk space cost and bandwidth cost increases dramatically for each bounce.

    The spam problem could be solved by limiting the number of bounced messages that can be sent from one host (NNTP-Posting-Host:, or even Path:), but that's only a partial solution.

  • not exactly e-mail forwarding... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jdbo ( 35629 ) on Tuesday August 27, 2002 @02:48AM (#4146816)
    ...rather, this looks like some sort of (centralized) email-address registry which can be accessed by e-mail clients/servers to look for a more recent version of an out-of-date e-mail address.

    in other words, this is little more than an internet-based look-up table of e-mail addresses (with obsolete addresses pointing to the most recent address) + protocols for accessing that look-up table.

    in my (admittedly cursory) of the patent, it doesn't seem to overlap with server-specific e-mail forwarding (i.e. what is normally done with e-mail forwarding). this isn't to say that this isn't a silly/sleazy patent, but rather that this won't necessarily interfere with how people currently handle e-mail forwarding (if someone sees an element of overlap that I am missing, please point it out!).

    Not that any of this is clear from the write-up, of course; sometimes I wish that passing reading comprehension and composition courses was mandatory for internet usage... then I think again, because ninjas are awesome [realultimatepower.net].
    • Claim 1 is exactly how the NIS aliases map + sendmail behaves...

      • I didn't see that myself (admittedly this is not my area of specialty) - could you briefly summarize the similarities to demonstrate this overlap?

        Besides, pointing out prior art in a /. patent discussion = good karma. ;)

        thanks!

    • ...rather, this looks like some sort of (centralized) email-address registry which can be accessed by e-mail clients/servers to look for a more recent version of an out-of-date e-mail address.

      Say hello to Mr. Spammer.

      After this "innovation", the spammers can look forward to having much better delivery rates. No need to buy the up-to-date addresses from harvesters, they can just have one collection of addresses and rely on this kind of service to deliver their load.

      Not only does this sound like a no-innovation, it smells like a big no-no in practise too. Those who want to mail me, should have my current mail address anyhow.

  • SENDMAIL: An Internetwork Mail Router (1985) (Score:3, Informative)

    by jukal ( 523582 ) on Tuesday August 27, 2002 @02:48AM (#4146818) Journal
    Ehmm. Great invention. Sorry to spoil the fun but .. :
    "...MMDF and sendmail both support aliasing, customized mailers, message batching, automatic forwarding to gateways, queueing, and retransmission."

    The orginal paper:
    SENDMAIL -- An Internetwork Mail Router [google.com], Eric Allman

  • It's not that bad: read the actual patent (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jon_eaves ( 22962 ) on Tuesday August 27, 2002 @02:49AM (#4146823) Homepage
    It's not click and forward, or "f" and forward or even ".forward" and forward.

    From the patent link A method of automatically resending an electronic message originally sent to a receiving user at a first address that is now invalid to a second address for the receiving user, wherein the second address has been registered with a forwarding address server

    It's very specifically related to dealing with bouncing mail and having a registry set up for when the bounce occurs stuff can happen to get the mail to the right place.

    Of course, I see a huge gaping security hole in this if I register the bounce address as mine.

    Yet another case of great editor review of stories. What's with the inflammatory headlines ? Clearly the person submitting the story didn't even read the article.

    • " It's very specifically related to dealing with bouncing mail and having a registry set up for when the bounce occurs stuff can happen to get the mail to the right place. "

      Do you mean, like sendmail.cf ? :)))

    • Dont patents have to be original? The IDEA is clearly NOT original, so i think they should only be able to patent a specific implementation. Then again, I don't care, i have droped the towel, if they want to fuck the world and charge us for breathing H2O while chewing fruit scented bum and looking at the sky, go ahead.

      The world is becoming a shitty place to live on thanks to these "rights" trolls :( (pd: this means i feel we are losing in the world economic pie division. The cake is beign awarded to whoever except the people that really push the economy. Al possible innovation paths are being cornered and you can't do anything without a huge number of lawers telling whcih cardinal point you can walk without infringing.

      (I know its not a highly positive post, but that's exactly the idea. I feel tired and sad about all these stupid patents...really)
    • Of course, I see a huge gaping security hole in this if I register the bounce address as mine

      Let's see... you know someone who gets canned at work, or maybe who has forgotten to pay their internet bill and was suspended from their service, or has died, or something. Quickly, you set up a webmail account and tell this service that you're the owner of those accounts. Now you're getting all of their mail!
    • Clearly the person submitting the story didn't even read the article.


      Since the average /. poster doesn't bother reading the story before posting a reply, it's just keeping in character!


      -h-

  • Wrong...its another "single central place" patent (Score:4, Insightful)

    by MosesJones ( 55544 ) on Tuesday August 27, 2002 @02:57AM (#4146844) Homepage
    This isn't about email forwarding its about being the single central place where peoples new email addresses are held. Basic idea is that they act like the postoffice does when you move.

    You tell the post-office
    You move
    People send mail to your old address
    Post office sends to new address

    So they've patented the smail process for email. Not actually original and misses one small but crucial point...

    NO-ONE IS THE CENTRAL AUTHORITY! For this to work then everyone would have to register at this place, and every email client would have to have a plug-in to work like this.

    Its one of those great "if we only get 10%" .com business plans, backed up by a patent in the "e" world that would never be allowed in the real world.
    • You have plenty of very large email services that are all but central email repositories. If I had a nickle for every one of my nucklehead users who forward their fi.edu addresses to yahoo.com, msn.com, or aol.com I would be rich.

      Hmmm. That sound like another one of those 10% style patents in the making!

      But seriously, what if one of the bigwhigs buys up this startup and begins to throw its weight around? Can you picture the mess that would be created by having to jump through hoops for small email systems to deliver to, say, M$ Outlook?

  • I can never escape (Score:5, Funny)

    by KarmaBitch ( 562896 ) on Tuesday August 27, 2002 @02:57AM (#4146845)
    So now.. When I offically kill an email address because of spam innundation wherever I go I still get all of the crap that was coming to my previous address!!

    Thanks.. I'm glad you patented the most annoying idea possible. So once I register I'm stalked by spam forever!... Wow... Where do I sign up?

  • SPAM Heaven (Score:2, Insightful)

    by KarmaBitch ( 562896 )
    Wouldn't this just be a huge honey pot (the real thing, like bears and stuff not the other [lucidic.net] one) for SPAMer's? Either: 1) Hack it and get a huge data-base of valid, known addresses to sell. 2) Or exploit it by including the code to get the new valid address to simply follow old email addresses around to continue to SPAM them... Also? Who's to say they won't SPAM the user base generated by the 'new' service they are selling?

  • I think this won't work because... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Advocadus Diaboli ( 323784 ) on Tuesday August 27, 2002 @03:12AM (#4146883)
    ...of the following reasons:

    1. It would mean that there is a server full of VALID email addresses. Do you really think that this isn't a nice source for spammers to get 100% valid addresses? I as a user won't trust that mechanism, especially there are some users that change their mail addresses frequently to avoid spam in their mailboxes.
    2. There is a nice thing like LDAP that can help me to find out the new address when I receive a bounce with "user unknown".
    3. The patent also says that the users address book will be updated automatically. I don't think that I should give an MTA like sendmail access to my private .aliases file.
    4. That thing doesn't help me at all if I have the address John.Doe@maildomain.com and I cancel this account and 5 minutes later another mail user registers for John.Doe@maildomain.com because then the mail address is not invalid anymore.
    I don't even think that telling my new mail address to the people from whom I want to receive mail in the future is a big deal. :-)

  • Infinite Mail Loops (Score:5, Funny)

    by unsinged int ( 561600 ) on Tuesday August 27, 2002 @03:12AM (#4146884)
    Suppose I have addresses me@A.com and me@B.com and I go to "themailregistry" and tell it both are expired and to forward A to B and B to A. Then I send myself an email at A.

    A bounces, checks with the registry, forwards to B, which bounces, checks with the registry, forwards to A, ad infinitum.

    Imagine this with a larger sequence of addresses or more groups of addresses, and consider it unlikely they'll scan their registry for graph cycles (since that's essentially what this is), and you've got a nasty nasty problem.
    • Say you have addresses A, B, and C, and C is on a machine you admin. Point both A and B to C, and make C an alias that points to A and B. Send mail to A, and you have . . .

      . . . well, a great server suicide plan if nothing else.

    • Suppose I have addresses me@A.com and me@B.com and I go to "themailregistry" and tell it both are expired and to forward A to B and B to A. Then I send myself an email at A. A bounces, checks with the registry, forwards to B, which bounces, checks with the registry, forwards to A, ad infinitum. Imagine this with a larger sequence of addresses or more groups of addresses, and consider it unlikely they'll scan their registry for graph cycles (since that's essentially what this is), and you've got a nasty nasty problem.

      Okay, so they add an X-Header that tells it that it's been automagically forwarded already, so it doesn't get forwarded again. And the webpage that you register on would check against the database for a match (in expired or valid) before letting you register.

    • Not ad infinitum. Isn't there a maximum number of hops SMTP will use?

      (Or am I confusing this with IP?)
    • Yep!

      A friend of mine set up one of those annoying auto-replies to her email. You would email her and in response you would get a "thank you" message back.

      Needless to say, anytime she received anything on our group mailing list, the group mailing list would get one of those annoying messages.

      Since she was a part of the group, she would then receive her own friggin autoreply back from the listserver.

      Which would cause her setup to autoreply back to the group.

      Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

      After a couple of days of her email doing this, I got annoyed to the point that I finally setup a couple of email accounts with autoreplies. I used these accounts to send a message to her.

      A rapid game of SMTP ping-pong ensued.

      Then the ISP called....

  • Stanford University, IBM, already "violating" it (Score:5, Informative)

    by tlambert ( 566799 ) on Tuesday August 27, 2002 @03:30AM (#4146919)
    Standford University and IBM corporation already maintain an external "registry" of valid email addresses and forwarding information, and use it to send either 551 or 251 response messages, which a mail client may use to update its address book (see RFC 2821, section 3.4, for details).

    Both of them maintain the information in an LDAP database, but you could do the same thing with a DNS server, or any other reasonable hierarchical database.

    The [internal to IBM] server is called "Blue Pages", and is actuallyan LDAP view onto a VM/CMS maintained database replica.

    -- Terry

  • ...this is a true innovation... (Score:5, Informative)

    by jukal ( 523582 ) on Tuesday August 27, 2002 @03:46AM (#4146947) Journal
    In addition to not containing anything new since sendmail, see these patents [uspto.gov] too:
    • 6,134,316: Telecommunications network with relocateability of subscriber number
    • 5,832,221: Universal message storage system
    • 5,828,836: Networked information communication system
    • 5,826,039: Universal connection point for resources and communication unrelated to a physical endpoint
    • 5,802,510: Universal directory service
    • 5,742,763: Universal message delivery system for handles identifying network presences
    • 5,675,733: Statistical analysis and display of reception status of electronic messages
    • 5,481,721: Method for providing automatic and dynamic translation of object oriented programming language-based message passing into operation system message passing using proxy objects
    In other words, this is another truly innovative piece of work!! ;))
  • Should everyone who writes a small perl script get a patent for it? Come on, you can get a patent on anything these days, it is completely dumb. This is not about protecting the little man from large corporations so the he is not ripped off, this is about using the law to force companies from staying competitive and to force money off other companies and people, through laws.

    It has gotten out of hand, it has become silly, and as with any dumb idea every concieved in the US, it is comming to Europe -_-

  • Free kewl email addresses (Score:3, Interesting)

    by XiC ( 207670 ) on Tuesday August 27, 2002 @04:40AM (#4147050)
    If I understand correctly:
    - I find a not used (1 that bounces back) email address @somecompany.com and register that as being mine and let it forward to my valid email addy....

    Example:
    IwouldReallyLikeToBeBillsWife@Microsof t.com forward to XiC@home.com

    Sign me up, $20 for a whole lot of fun (and porn spam) is a Good Thing.

  • Patent spamming (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Dexter77 ( 442723 )
    I wish somebody would patent spamming and raise the royalties so high that nobody could spam ever again.

  • How can you patent this? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Saggi ( 462624 ) on Tuesday August 27, 2002 @06:24AM (#4147285) Homepage
    In Denmark where I live, we have snail-mail forwarding. If you send a letter to someone who has moved, and the postman arrive at the address and see he can't deliver the letter her returns to the mail office with the letter. Here he lookup in a database to see where the person has moved to and forward the letter to the new address!

    Now this is identical to the patent, except the patent goes for electronic mail. I don't see how you can patent a common method used for ages, simply by applying it to some new technology, when the method is the same.

    If this is allowed (and it appears to be) then you can start looking through all daily methods, techniques etc. and start patenting the electronic versions.
  • If I work at a company called XYZ.com, I have an email-address onet@xyz.com.
    If I leave this organisation I am probably no longer allowed to recieve mail from clients on behalf of the company.
    If I can setup this account at mail-registry, which forwards all bounced mail from company XYZ.com, then XYZ.com has *no longer control* of who recieves email addressed to them.

    I feel this is WRONG and therefore will hopefully never get implemented in MTA's and MUAs that take themselves seriously.

  • I guess the next step will be that the process of getting a patent will have been patented by someone, and the PTO will have to pay royalties to them.
    sir_haxalot

  • Patents and Prior Art (Score:2, Interesting)

    by sirisak ( 590510 )
    Having applied for various patents (in the U.S.), my experience is that it is very easy to get a patent approved. It is moderately hard to defend your patent, should someone challenge it, if it is ludicrous, as many suggest in this particular case. Prior art also only seems to apply if it's so obvious it could bite you if you put a finger inside the cage. The company I worked for successfully managed to patent a glorified answering machine, which incorporated a few "follow-me"-services, if you remember those being all the rage a few years ago. I spent days in Visio drawing flowcharts and random technobabble because our laywer asked us to produce such documents, after which he said "this will be patented without a problem!". He also said, and this is the interesting part, that "if challenged, your patent will most likely get tossed, but the likelihood of that happening is slim to none". Oh, and as a side note; during the patenting process, you're allowed to use "Patent Pending", because, well, it is. If you get your patent challenged and overturned, change a few things, pay the lawyer more money, and resume business as patent pending.

  • Prior Art... (Score:4, Informative)

    by thogard ( 43403 ) on Tuesday August 27, 2002 @08:37AM (#4147639) Homepage
    (Yes I read the silly patent...)

    ISODE your friendly x.400 email gateway was doing this in '93 or maybe even before. Its part of the requirements for GOSSIP (the us goverments do all email system)

    The more I remember about X.400, the more I'm glad the words "or SMTP" got added to the offical X.400 migration document.

  • heh (Score:2)

    by zapfie ( 560589 )
    All patents bad! Must post misleading headline! Need page hits!
  • I just submitted a patent for this new thing I've created. It's a round flat thing that I call (my best Doctor Evil finger quotes immitation) "a wheel." As far as I can tell, there is no prior art on this concept, but it's my contention that two or more of these "wheels", when connected by a post of some sort, that I call "an axle" (patent pending), can be used to make it easier to move a load from one location to another.

    I don't know why nobody thought of this before.

  • Prior art in RFC 821 (Score:4, Informative)

    by riflemann ( 190895 ) <riflemann@@@bb...cactii...net> on Tuesday August 27, 2002 @09:46AM (#4148022)
    RFC821 includes almost exactly this patent (hopefully enough to quash it), especially
    the 551 response:

    3.2. FORWARDING

    There are some cases where the destination information in the
    <forward-path> is incorrect, but the receiver-SMTP knows the
    correct destination. In such cases, one of the following replies
    should be used to allow the sender to contact the correct
    destination.

    [...]
    551 User not local; please try <forward-path>

    This reply indicates that the receiver-SMTP knows the user's
    mailbox is on another host and indicates the correct
    forward-path to use. Note that either the host or user or
    both may be different. The receiver refuses to accept mail
    for this user, and the sender must either redirect the mail
    according to the information provided or return an error
    response to the originating user.

    Or can the lawyers see holes in that?
  • Doesn't the USPO already do this? Don't they have claim to prior art.
  • HMM when did rfc 821 come out? I was under the impression that this first claim was just the simple mail transport protocol in 'legal' mumbo jumbo.

    Isn't this what happens when you send an email to your ISP and it FORWARDS that email to the next system and so on? This is called relaying or something.

    HELO slashdot
    MAIL FROM me
    RCPT TO someone@uspto.gov
    DATA
    Date: today
    From: me
    To: someone@uspto.gov
    Subject: your a bunch of idiots
    Need I say more?
    .
    QUIT

    Hmm wont this get 'relayed' / 'forwarded' to them ???

    Gotta hate tech unaware people...

    • I almost forgot. They filed in 1999. ANY EMAIL program that does forwarding would be prior art to this. Hmm like when did Netscape add email to their product first? Oh that's right I was using Eudora back then. They had forwarding and reply in 1994. I think that consists of enough prior art. Who wants to go after them?

  • .forward (Score:3, Funny)

    by jonr ( 1130 ) on Tuesday August 27, 2002 @12:40PM (#4149360) Homepage Journal
    When was .forward first used? This is getting even sillier. PTO should be renamed Ministry Of Silly Ideas (ala Monty Python).

  • Dammit, I knew I had something to add to this. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Xenopax ( 238094 ) <xenopax.cesmail@net> on Tuesday August 27, 2002 @01:12PM (#4149697) Journal
    It's late in the discussion, but here I go....

    Back when I was a poor college student and PSU (The Pennsylvania State University) I remember a professor of mine in an algorithms class talk about the problem of searching a patent database. I forget all the figures, and who this professor was, and all the other important details, but I do remember he said that it was an extremely hard problem, to the point where PSU told the USPTO that it was impossible, because there was no way you could sustain the search at the rate patents were being submitted. It was something like, to do 1 keyword search (nothing fancy) it would take say an hour to do (I forget the numbers, like I said) at the time patents were rolling in at something much higher, like 200/hr or something alot higher than you would think.

    So basically the long short of this garbled mess of memories is to do a really good search using all kinds of fancy algorithms and stuff on the full patent database would never work since there are too many patents to search, especially at the rate they are coming in.

    And before you say "hardware has gotten a lot faster" remember this was brought up in an alorithm class, so it is doubtful that hardware has caught up to the rate they need. I really need to find a link to this problem so I can be a little more intelligent about this post. :-) (to google...)

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