Patent ID: 8117267

Claim:
A system for provisioning a new electronic mail (email) account for allowing access to an electronic mailbox from a remote device to retrieve email, the system comprising: a processor and a memory coupled thereto defining a communications module and a configuration module; and a database containing relevant configuration conventions comprising sets of email expressions formed by symbols symbolically representing the conventions used by email service providers for a set of configuration parameters; said communications module configured to receive email address parameters comprising at least an email address; transmit a domain name system (DNS) query to the Internet for returning, at a same time, mail exchange (MX) and address (A) records, the query including a user domain based on the email address; said configuration module further configured to determine whether any MX or A records exist based on the user domain, determine a mail server for an email domain of the new email account based on at least one of the MX and A records returned in the query, the mail server determined without attempting to validate all possible email domains, generate sets of possible configuration parameters for attempting access to an electronic mailbox by using heuristics of likelihood of whether a set of configuration parameters would be valid for accessing the electronic mailbox determine when no MX and A records exist based upon the query, email cannot be delivered to or retrieved from the new email account based on the entered email address parameters, and indicate that incorrect email address parameters have been entered and provisioning of the new email account cannot begin until correct email address parameters are entered.