Patent ID: 7552185

Claim:
A method of managing a sender's email recipient fields comprising: generating a new email message having a General, Primary, CC or BCC recipient field; receiving a list of recipients entered by a user in an email message, wherein a recipient is an individual or email group entered into the General, Primary, CC or BCC recipient fields; determining whether each recipient is associated with a transmission rule comprising a preference for receiving an email transmission as a Primary, CC or BCC recipient; delegating each recipient entered into the general recipient field to the Primary, CC or BCC recipient field based on the transmission rule corresponding to the recipient; prompting the sender for a recipient field delegation where there is no transmission rule associated with a recipient in the general recipient field; delegating the recipient in the general recipient field to a Primary, CC or BCC recipient field based on the sender's response to the field delegation prompt; prompting the sender to create a transmission rule for the recipient if no such rule exists; creating a new transmission rule for the recipient based on the sender's response to the transmission rule prompt; determining whether a recipient's delegation to a Primary, CC or BCC field conflicts with the transmission rule for the recipient; prompting the sender to redelegate a recipient if the recipient delegation to a Primary, CC or BCC recipient field conflicts with the recipient's transmission rule; delegating the recipient to a recipient field based on the sender's response to the redelegation prompt; determining whether an individual recipient is subject to multiple transmission rules; prompting the sender to select a single transmission rule for the individual recipient having more than one transmission rule; delegating the individual recipient to a single recipient field based on the sender's response to the multiple transmission rule prompt; and sending the email message to its intended recipients.