Parsing of nested internet electronic mail documents

• US 7,103,599 B2
• Filed: 08/28/2001
• Issued: 09/05/2006
• Est. Priority Date: 05/15/2001
• Status: Expired due to Fees

• Current Assignee: Verizon Patent and Licensing Incorporated (Verizon Communications Inc.)
• Original Assignee: Verizon Laboratories Incorporated (Verizon Communications Inc.)
• Inventors: Buford, John F., Huang, Xiaolan
• Primary Examiner(s): Gaffin, Jeffrey
• Assistant Examiner(s): Veillard, Jacques
• Application Number:
  US09/941,105
• Publication Number:
  US 20030041126A1
• Time in Patent Office: 1,834 Days
• Field of Search: 707/1, 707/10, 707/102, 707/104.1, 707/2, 707/200, 709/217, 709/218, 709/203, 709/206, 709/202, 709/245, 709/246, 709/207, 709/248, 709/238
• US Class Current: 1/1
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 10/107 Computer-aided management of electronic mailing [e-mailing]

Abstract

A system and method for automatically processing and responding to large volumes of customer complaints regarding Unsolicited Commercial Email (UCE) and other service disruptions. The complaints include one or more electronic mail (email) documents, each email document including a header and body portion. The process parses the header and body portions from each email document, normalizes the header and body portion by stripping unwanted characters, and extracts specific information relating to the email document from the source of the complaint. The extracted information can be input to a database that can be accessed by the Customer Support Center (CSC) of the Internet Service Provider (ISP).

Claims

1. A method for parsing nested electronic mail documents over a computer network, the method comprising the steps of:

retrieving a complaint from a complainant about an incident over the computer network;

parsing the complaint into a plurality of components, wherein the step of parsing includes breaking up an electronic mail message nested in the complaint into the plurality of components;

normalizing one of the plurality of components; and

using an analysis protocol on one of the plurality of components to extract information relating to the complaint.

2. The method of claim 1, wherein the parsing step further includes locating a header in one of the plurality of components.

3. The method of claim 2, further including the step of locating a header keyword in the header.

4. The method of claim 3, wherein the normalizing step includes removing at least one character from the header based on the header keyword.

5. The method of claim 1, further including the step of locating a Received line in one of the plurality of components.

6. The method of claim 5, further including the step of validating a source IP address from the Received line.

7. The method of claim 6, wherein the source IP address is validated by locating one or more delimiters in the Received line.

8. The method of claim 1, further including the step of categorizing the complaint into a category.

9. The method of claim 1, wherein the extracted information comprises one of a complaint tracking code, a source IP address, a Received Line, a First Line, a URL, and a body of one of the plurality of components.

10. The method of claim 9, wherein the extracted information forms a record of a database.

11. A method for parsing nested electronic mail documents over a computer network, the method comprising the steps of:

retrieving a complaint from a complainant about an incident over the computer network;

parsing the complaint into a body and a header, wherein the step of parsing includes breaking up an electronic mail message nested in the complaint into the body and the header of the complaint;

normalizing the body and the header of the complaint; and

extracting specific fields from the body and the header of the complaint using an analysis protocol.

12. The method of claim 11, further including the step of locating a header keyword in the header of the complaint.

13. The method of claim 12, further including the step of removing at least one character from the header based on the header keyword.

14. The method of claim 11, further including the step of locating a Received line in one of the plurality of components.

15. The method of claim 14, further including the step of validating a source IP address from the Received line.

16. The method of claim 15, further including the step of using the Received line to validate an IP address of a source of the complaint.

17. The method of claim 16, wherein the IP address of the source of the complaint is validated by locating one or more delimiters in the Received line.

18. The method of claim 11, further including the step of categorizing the complaint to determine an action based on a category of the complaint.

19. The method of claim 11, wherein the extracted fields comprise one of a complaint tracking code from the header of the complaint, an IP address from the header of the complaint, a Received Line from the header of the complaint, a First Line from the body of the complaint, and a URL from the body of the complaint.

20. A system for processing a complaint received over a computer network, comprising:

a message parser adapted to break a message into a plurality of message components, wherein the message comprises an electronic mail message nested in the complaint;

a normalizer for converting at least one of the plurality of message components into a common presentation format associated with that message component; and

an analysis protocol adapted to analyze the plurality of message components by way of the common presentation format.

21. The system of claim 20, wherein the analysis protocol further includes an extractor adapted to isolate specific information in the message in accordance with predetermined criteria.

22. The system of claim 21, wherein the extractor searches for at least one of an IP address, a domain name, and an electronic mail address.

23. The system of claim 22, wherein the extractor identifies an alphanumeric character associated with the IP address, the domain name or the electronic mail address.

24. The system of claim 20, wherein the message components include a header and a body.

25. A system for processing a complaint relating to a service disruption over a computer network, comprising:

an organization for providing services for a complainant on a computer network,

wherein the organization retrieves a complaint from the complainant relating to the service disruption and processes the complaint by parsing the complaint into a plurality of components, normalizing the plurality of components, and extracting specific fields from at least one of the plurality of components of the complaint, and

wherein the step of parsing includes breaking up an electronic mail message nested in the complaint into the plurality of components.

26. The system according to claim 25, wherein one of the specific fields comprises a source IP address.