Patent ID: 7801959

Claim:
A communication system for pushing electronic messages to a wireless portable device to advise a user when an electronic message is received and to provide the user with a subset of the electronic message to allow the user to download electronic messages of interest for viewing at the wireless portable device, comprising: a mail server comprising a computer system having a processor that executes instructions to implement an electronic mail interface configured to be coupled to the Internet, for storing an electronic mail message received over the Internet and for generating a copy of said electronic mail message; a notifications server, coupled to said mail server, a computer system having a processor that executes instructions to implement a standard electronic mail protocol for automatically receiving said copy of said electronic mail message as a standard formatted electronic mail message and wherein said notifications server comprises a user information database for providing a mapping between wireless electronic devices and their associated electronic mail addresses; wherein said mail server automatically forwards using standard mail protocols the copies of the received messages to said notifications server; wherein said notifications server is for automatically generating, therefrom, a subset of said received copy of said electronic mail message, wherein said subset is a notification message comprising at least one of a sender's identification and a subject field of said received electronic mail message; wherein said notifications server, upon generation of said subset, is configured to automatically transmit without any user trigger said subset to an identified wireless electronic device associated with a user that is the recipient of said received electronic mail message; wherein said identified wireless electronic device is operable to display received subsets to a user and wherein the user subsequently is able to select the subset; wherein said notifications server transmits a remainder of said electronic mail message corresponding to said particular subset in response to said selection and thereby download the remainder of the electronic mail message to said identified electronic wireless device; and wherein a push packet is used by said notifications server to transmit said subset to said identified wireless electronic device.