Patent ID: 7099867

Claim:
A message transmitting and receiving apparatus comprising: a memory, storing keywords associated with said apparatus and degrees of importance of said keywords, the keywords being stored in said memory and used only for a user of said message transmitting and receiving apparatus; a detector, detecting an occurrence of a transmitted or received message; an extractor, in response to the detection of the occurrence of said received message, extracting a keyword from said received message, wherein the keywords stored in said memory are used for indicating, to the user of said message transmitting and receiving apparatus, the occurrence of the received message from another apparatus containing the keyword stored in said memory; importance determiner unit, determining dynamically a degree of importance of said extracted keyword and updating said keywords and said degrees of importance in said memory, wherein the degree of importance of the keywords changes in accordance with time, said importance determiner unit raises the degree of importance of the keyword stored in said memory, in response to the detection of the occurrence of the transmitted message which has been prepared in said apparatus in response to the received message containing the keyword, and said importance determiner unit causes the degree of importance of the keyword to be lowered in accordance with time in the absence of the occurrence of the transmitted message, and said importance determiner unit does not raise the degree of importance of the keyword when the occurrence of the received message containing the keyword has been detected but the occurrence of the transmitted message which has been prepared in said apparatus in response to the received message containing the keyword has not been detected; and an indicator, providing an indication of the occurrence of said extracted keyword within said received message in accordance with the determined degree of importance of said extracted keyword.