Patent ID: 7783711

Claim:
A secure e-mail system, comprising: a sender client component for composing and sending an e-mail message addressed to a first recipient with associated message control policies that control whether the first recipient of the e-mail message can forward the e-mail message to a second recipient; a server system that hosts a secure e-mail service, said secure e-mail service configured to receive a first permission request from the sender client component to send the e-mail message using the secure e-mail service, authorize, at the time of e-mail message composing by a sender, sending of the e-mail message using the secure e-mail service based on subscription of the sender client component to the secure e-mail service, receive the e-mail message and message control policies from the sender client component over a secure HTTPS communications protocol, and store the e-mail message and message control policies from the sender client component in a secure message repository on the server system; and a recipient computing device configured to send a download request to the secure e-mail service to securely retrieve the e-mail message from the secure message repository via the secure HTTPS communications protocol, send a second permission request to the secure e-mail service at the time of an attempt by the first recipient to forward the e-mail message to the second recipient with a child e-mail message, and send the child e-mail message to the server system for storage in response to receiving authorization to forward the e-mail message with the child e-mail message; where the secure e-mail service is configured to, at the time of the attempt by the first recipient to forward the e-mail message, receive and check the second permission request against the message control policies, and based on a result of the check, reply to the recipient computing device granting or denying permission to forward the e-mail message by the first recipient to the second recipient.