Patent ID: 8898240

Claim:
A non-transitory, computer-readable medium storing computer-executable instructions that when executed by a message deduplication apparatus, control the message deduplication apparatus to perform a method, the method comprising: accessing a messaging policy, where the messaging policy compares subblocks using hash functions; upon determining that a message in a message thread complies with the messaging policy, displaying the message in the message thread; and upon determining that the message does not comply with the messaging policy and that the message does not contain information present in the message thread, displaying the message in the message thread; upon determining that the message does not comply with the messaging policy and that the message contains information present in the message thread, not displaying the message in the message thread, where determining whether the message contains information present in the message thread is performed using data deduplication, where the data deduplication reduces redundant data by storing a single copy of data, where the data deduplication involves chunking the message into subblocks consisting of groups of data, where as new subblocks are chunked the new subblocks are compared to unique subblocks in storage, where new subblocks that are unique are stored as unique subblocks and where new subblocks that are identified as having been previously stored are identified as containing duplicative information.