Patent ID: 8312089

Claim:
A method to estimate a response time based on a set of recipients for an email message, the method comprising: determining a set of email recipients identified by a user, the set of email recipients comprising intended recipients of a new email message from the user; determining one or more response times for each recipient from the set of email recipients, each response time based on an elapsed time between a send time a user sends an email message and a receive time the user receives a response to the email message; determining a response time trend for each recipient from the set of email recipients, each response time trend based on the one or more response times of one of the recipients from the set of email recipients; determining an estimated response time for the new email message based on the response time trends for each recipient; displaying a visual representation of the estimated response time to the user; suggesting a recipient from a plurality of recipients for the user to add to the set of email recipients based on a response time trend corresponding to the suggested recipient, such that an addition of the suggested recipient to the set of email recipients lowers the estimated response time; determining one or more optional response recipients identified by the user, the one or more optional response recipients comprising intended recipients of the new email message whose response time trends are factored out of the estimated response time for the new email message; and identifying a designation from the user that represents a desired number of responses to the new email message, the estimated response time for the new email message comprising an estimated amount of time in which the user is likely to receive the desired number of responses to the new email message based on the response time trends.