IMAGE BASED ELECTRONIC MAIL SYSTEM
First Claim
1. A method, comprising:
- associating images with different electronic mail (email) senders;
receiving emails from the different email senders;
identifying the images associated with the received emails; and
displaying the identified images to provide visual association of received emails with the displayed images.
4 Assignments
0 Petitions
Accused Products
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.
288 Citations
35 Claims
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1. A method, comprising:
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associating images with different electronic mail (email) senders; receiving emails from the different email senders; identifying the images associated with the received emails; and displaying the identified images to provide visual association of received emails with the displayed images. - View Dependent Claims (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15)
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16. An electronic mail system, comprising:
a processor configured to associate unique identifying images with the different senders of electronic mail (email), the processor further configured to then receive email from different senders and then display the images associated with the senders of the received email. - View Dependent Claims (17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23)
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24. A computing device storing instructions in an electronic storage medium that when executed comprise:
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operating a social interaction website that assigns points to members conducting social interactions with other website members; presenting an email interface for creating and sending email messages; and assigning points to website members that send email messages to other website members. - View Dependent Claims (25, 26, 27)
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28. A method, comprising:
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receiving an email message; identifying a sender of the received email message; moving the email message to an inbox when the identified sender is identified in a contacts list of the email recipient; moving the email message to a provisional email box when the identified sender is not identified in the contacts list of the email recipient; sending a challenge message back to the identified email sender that includes a Universal Resource Locator (URL) link to a challenge response server; and moving the receive email message from the provisional email box to the inbox when the sender clicks on the URL link initiating a response back to the challenge response server. - View Dependent Claims (29)
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30. A method, comprising:
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receiving an email message; searching through a website member directory or a user contacts list for a photo associated with a sender of the email message; and displaying any identified photo from the website member directory or the user contacts list on an email inbox page to provide visual identification of the received email message sender. - View Dependent Claims (31, 32, 33, 34, 35)
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Specification