Patent ID: 7461151

Claim:
A method for controlling the flow of exchanged electronic documents comprising the steps of: receiving an electronic document by a recipient, said document being part of a set of documents which are interrelated through a non-thread historical tree structure; extracting and storing a plurality of unique identifier values guaranteed to be unique within a messaging network (GUID) associated with said document including a GUID for the document itself (SelfGUID), a GUID indicating a original predecessor document (OriginGUID) to which said received document is related, and a GUID indicating an immediate predecessor parent document (ParentGUID) to said received document; accumulating GUID values for a plurality of additional messages which are part of said non-thread historical tree structure; responsive to a user composing a new document related to said received document performing historical participation analysis of said non-thread historical tree structure using said stored GUID values according to a set of user preferences to classify one or more potential recipients; and proposing at least one list of recipients of said new document according to said potential recipient classifications.