Patent ID: 8849919

Claim:
A method for processing e-mail messages in an electronic mail communication system comprising at least one mail server and a plurality of mail clients, comprising: receiving an incoming e-mail message by the at least one mail server, wherein the incoming e-mail message includes at least a message body; splitting up the message body of the incoming e-mail message before forwarding, wherein the splitting yields a plurality of elementary mail segments, and wherein the splitting is textually based; storing the plurality of elementary mail segments in a mail store table, wherein the incoming e-mail message in its original form is not stored on the at least one mail server, and wherein the plurality of elementary mail segments are non-redundantly stored in the mail store table; reconstructing the incoming e-mail from a concatenation of the plurality of elementary mail segments by the at least one mail server prior to forwarding the reconstructed concatenation; forwarding the reconstructed concatenation to at least one of the plurality of mail clients; computing a unique ID for each of the plurality of elementary mail segments, wherein the unique ID is used as an index for accessing a mail store table, wherein the mail store table mail server; looking up the computed unique ID of each elementary mail segment in said mail store table, wherein any redundancy of the plurality of elementary mail segments is removed, such that each of the plurality of elementary mail segments is stored exactly once; and in case the computed unique ID of an elementary mail segment does not exist in the mail store table, storing the elementary mail segment as a new entry in the mail store table together with a link to its particular parent elementary mail segment, thus defining one or more ordered sequences of inter-related elementary mail segments, wherein said unique ID is computed based on a combination of the following values: the contents of the message header “from”-field, a consistently used time stamp, the contents of the message header “to”-field, the contents of the message header “subject”-field, and the body of the elementary mail segment.