Patent ID: 7996406

Claim:
A method of processing network traffic, comprising: extracting web pages from network traffic; identifying fields in each page of a group of the web pages that share a document structure, wherein the step of identifying comprises: executing a document clustering algorithm using the web pages as parametric input to establish the group of web pages; executing a structure extraction algorithm configured to: identify structural portions of the pages in the group of web pages; determine at least one common structural portion in the structural portions as being shared across all pages in the group of web pages, the at least one common structural portion comprising the document structure; and determine each of the structural portions other than the at least one structural portion to be the fields; performing a statistical analysis of the fields of each page in the group of web pages to identify any electronic mail (e-mail) fields; and indicating the group of web pages to include web-based e-mail messages if the fields of each page in the group of web pages include at least one e-mail field.