Patent ID: 9602452
Date: 2017-03-21
CPC Classifications: G06Q,H04L

Claim:
1. A method for processing e-mail messages in an electronic mail communication system comprising at least one mail server and a plurality of mail clients comprising: receiving an incoming message e-mail message by the at least one mail server, wherein the incoming e-mail message includes at least a message body; splitting up the message body of the incoming e-mail message before forwarding, by identifying portions within the message body that represent elements of an e-mail thread using a combination of support from a messaging system, textual patterns and heuristics, wherein the splitting up yields a plurality of elementary mail segments; computing a unique ID for each of the plurality of elementary mail segments, wherein the unique ID is used as an index for accessing a redundancy-reduced mail store table, and wherein the unique ID for each of the plurality of elementary mail segments is computed from discrete components of each of the plurality of elementary mail segments; and storing each of the plurality of elementary mail segments in the redundancy-reduced mail store table, together with a link to a respective particular parent elementary mail segment for each of the plurality of elementary mail segments, defining one or more ordered sequences of interrelated elementary mail segments, wherein the incoming e-mail message in its original form is not stored, and wherein each of the plurality of elementary mail segments are organized by a plurality of common e-mail threads and stored as nodes in the redundancy-reduced mail store table, each node consisting of textual content of a respective elementary mail segment, a pointer to another node and a list of attachment IDs, and wherein each of the stored plurality of elementary mail segments are unique.