Patent ID: 8078681

Claim:
A system for provisioning an electronic mail (email) account of a user for allowing access to an electronic mailbox from a remote device to retrieve email, the system comprising: a mobile office platform operative as an agent between the user and the electronic mailbox of the user hosted by an email service provider, and comprising a database containing relevant configuration conventions including email expressions formed by symbols symbolically representing conventions used by email service providers for a set of configuration parameters; and a processor and a memory and defining a communications module and a configuration module, the communications module receives email address parameters of the user and transmits a domain name system (DNS) query to the Internet for returning, at a same time, mail exchange (MX) and address (A) records corresponding to the email address parameters entered by the user, the configuration module, processes returned MX records to determine whether the email address parameters entered by the user are valid for accessing the email account of the user to retrieve email from the electronic mailbox of the user, and when the provisioning from processing returned MX records fails, processing returned A records to determine the email account parameters, and when the provisioning from processing returned A records fails, requesting corrected email address parameters from the user and generating sets of possible configuration parameters, by using heuristics of likelihood the configuration parameters would be valid for accessing the electronic mailbox, for provisioning and accessing the email account.