Patent ID: 7454778

Claim:
In an electronic messaging system, a method of ensuring that confidential, proprietary, privileged or other sensitive subject matter is not inappropriately transferred between domains with differing security rights by utilizing policy documents that include semantics pattern recognition data for identifying sensitive messages according to policies and semantics, the method comprising acts of: receiving a message at a message transfer agent located at a boundary between at least two domains with different security rights, the message including sensitive subject matter that is not supposed to be inappropriately transferred between the at least two domains based on the security rights of each domain; accessing a policy document containing one or more pieces of evidence, which are configurable characteristics comprising semantic recognition data corresponding to the sensitive subject matter contained within the message, and the policy document also containing policy remedies indicating actions to be taken; comparing each of the one or more pieces of evidence within the policy document with content within the message for identifying the sensitive subject matter in the message; identifying the sensitive subject matter by determining that there is at least one match between at least one of the pieces of evidence of the policy document and content within the message; based upon the at least one match between the at least one piece of evidence and the content within the message, determining one or more actions to be taken on the message in accordance with policy remedies for ensuring that the sensitive subject matter is not inappropriately transferred between the at least two domains; and taking the determined one or more actions in accordance with the policy remedies as contained within the policy document.