Identifying and correlating electronic mail messages
First Claim
1. A method for identifying and correlating an incoming e-mail message with a previous e-mail message referenced in a database, the method comprising:
- receiving the incoming e-mail message;
in response to receiving the incoming e-mail message, determining whether the incoming e-mail message is related to a previous e-mail message in the database;
in response to determining that the incoming e-mail message is related to a previous e-mail message in the database, determining whether data stored in a first field and a second field of the incoming e-mail message sufficiently matches data stored in the database for a corresponding first field and a second field of the previous e-mail message to correlate the incoming e-mail message with the previous e-mail message, and correlating the incoming e-mail message with the previous e-mail message in response to determining that data stored in the first and second fields of the incoming e-mail message sufficiently matches data stored in the database for the corresponding first and second fields of the previous e-mail message.
2 Assignments
0 Petitions
Accused Products
Abstract
Technologies are described herein for identifying and correlating e-mail messages. The contents of the subject and recipients fields of e-mail messages received at and sent from a computing system are hashed and stored in a database. When an incoming e-mail message is received at the computing system, the contents of its subject and recipients fields are also hashed. A search is then made of the database to locate e-mail messages identified in the database that have a sufficient number of subject and address hash values that match the subject and address hash values generated for the incoming e-mail message so that the messages may be correlated. A correlation is made between the incoming e-mail message and the best matching e-mail message located during the search of the database.
125 Citations
20 Claims
-
1. A method for identifying and correlating an incoming e-mail message with a previous e-mail message referenced in a database, the method comprising:
-
receiving the incoming e-mail message; in response to receiving the incoming e-mail message, determining whether the incoming e-mail message is related to a previous e-mail message in the database; in response to determining that the incoming e-mail message is related to a previous e-mail message in the database, determining whether data stored in a first field and a second field of the incoming e-mail message sufficiently matches data stored in the database for a corresponding first field and a second field of the previous e-mail message to correlate the incoming e-mail message with the previous e-mail message, and correlating the incoming e-mail message with the previous e-mail message in response to determining that data stored in the first and second fields of the incoming e-mail message sufficiently matches data stored in the database for the corresponding first and second fields of the previous e-mail message. - View Dependent Claims (2, 3, 4)
-
-
5. A method for identifying and correlating an incoming electronic mail (e-mail) message to one of a plurality of e-mail messages received at or sent from a computing system, each of the plurality of e-mail messages having content stored in a subject field and identifying one or more recipients by an e-mail address, the method comprising:
-
identifying one or more tokens for the content in the subject field of the plurality of e-mail messages; generating a subject hash value for each of the tokens; generating an address hash value for each of the e-mail addresses of the recipients of the plurality of e-mail messages; storing the subject hash values and the address hash values in a database; receiving an incoming e-mail message; and in response to receiving the incoming e-mail message, correlating the incoming e-mail message to one of the plurality of e-mail messages using the subject hash values and the address hash values stored in the database. - View Dependent Claims (6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12)
-
-
13. A computer-readable medium having computer-executable instructions stored thereon which, when executed by a computer, cause the computer to:
-
receive an incoming e-mail message having a subject field and one or more address fields, each address field having one or more recipient e-mail addresses stored therein; in response to receiving the incoming e-mail message, to tokenize the subject field of the incoming e-mail message into one or more tokens, to generate a subject hash value for each of the tokens, and to generate an address hash value for each of the recipient e-mail addresses; and to identify the incoming e-mail message as being related to a preexisting e-mail message using the subject hash values and the address hash values; and in response to identifying the e-mail message as being related to a preexisting e-mail message, to correlate the incoming e-mail message to a preexisting e-mail message using the subject hash values and the address hash values. - View Dependent Claims (14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20)
-
Specification