Patent ID: 6985923

Claim:
A method for processing redundant electronic mail messages comprising: receiving electronic mail messages addressed to a recipient, wherein a portion of the received electronic mail message include a respective redundancy attribute appended to the respective electronic mail message by a sender of the electronic mail message and a portion of the received electronic mail message do not include the redundancy attribute; for each received electronic mail message addressed to the recipient that includes an appended redundancy attribute: determining whether the received electronic mail message is at least substantially similar to an available, previously received electronic mail message also addressed to the recipient; and if so, deleting the received electronic mail message; and for each received electronic mail message addressed to the recipient that does not include an appended redundancy attribute, allowing the received electronic mail message to be made available to the recipient, whereby the presence of respective redundancy attributes causes received electronic mail messages with respective redundancy attributes to be selectively distinguished from received electronic mail messages without redundancy attributes and then deleted.