Patent ID: 8447764

Claim:
A method comprising: storing information describing configurations of EMT (electronic message transmission) discussion threads of EMTs, the EMT discussion threads comprising respective series of EMTs that are exchanged among at least two individuals and having a root EMT, zero or more reply EMTs, and a last offspring EMT, the EMT discussion threads further comprising threads wherein each of the EMTs contains a full content of predecessor EMTs, wherein storing information comprises: enumerating said EMTs by assigning numerical identifiers to the EMTs according to creation times thereof; determining a thread type of said EMT discussion threads, respectively, the thread type being selected from a linear thread type, wherein each EMT contains a full text of each preceding EMT of its respective series of EMTs, and a conjoined thread type that comprises a set of EMT discussion threads that share a common root EMT; identifying the root EMT of the EMT discussion threads, respectively; and identifying the last offspring EMT of the EMT discussion threads, respectively; compacting said EMT discussion threads; and indexing compacted EMT discussion threads generated by said compacting to generate an index of well-ordered threads comprising a compact EMT volume of new content text of the EMTs and metadata of the predecessor EMTs in the respective well-ordered threads thereof and wherein the well-ordered threads of the compact EMT volume exclude repetitions of content text of the predecessor EMTs, and the index further comprises an inverted index for the compact EMT volume, wherein the metadata is a record of information regarding a sender, recipient, subject and chronology of the EMTs.