Patent ID: 7647428

Claim:
An email relay method for sending an email attached with a moving image to a terminal as a destination of the email, the email relay method comprising the steps of: judging a model of a recipient terminal based on a destination email address included in a header of the email to determine a recipient terminal type, with at least one associated media file format corresponding to the recipient terminal type; determining the recipient terminal is capable of displaying a moving image and sending the moving image to the recipient terminal when the recipient terminal type is capable of displaying a moving image based upon the recipient terminal type and the at least one associated media file format; determining the recipient terminal type is capable of displaying a multimedia image when the recipient terminal type is not capable of displaying a moving image; converting the moving image into a multimedia image when the recipient terminal type is not capable of moving image display and associates the conversion of the moving image with a media file format corresponding to the recipient terminal type for multimedia image display, whereby the email relay sends the multimedia image instead of the moving image to the recipient terminal; determining the recipient terminal type is capable of displaying a reduced-color image when the recipient terminal type is not capable of displaying a moving image and a multimedia image; and converting the moving image into a reduced-color moving image when the recipient terminal type is not capable of a moving image display and is not capable of a multimedia image display, but is capable of a reduced-color moving image display and associates the conversion of the moving image with a media file format corresponding to the recipient terminal type for a multimedia image display, whereby the email relay sends the reduced-color moving image to the recipient terminal, wherein converting the moving image into a multimedia image includes: sampling frames from the moving image; enlarging or reducing the frames according to the characteristic of the display device; compressing the frames by the compression method considering two-dimensional redundancy so that a data size of the multimedia image can be dealt with by the display device; and generating the multimedia image by compiling the frames compressed by the by the compression method, and wherein compressing the frames further comprises: repeating the changing of a compression ratio of the frames and/or thinning of the frames until the data size of the multimedia image becomes the data size that can be dealt with by the display device when the data size of the multimedia image is larger than the data size that can be dealt with by the display device.