Patent ID: 7904321

Claim:
A method for distributing and managing electronic information between a sender and a recipient, the method comprising: creating at least one of an event and a schedule of events on an application on a sender terminal, wherein the electronic message for events comprises the at least one of the event and the schedule of events; identifying at least one of a user and a group of users associated with said schedule of events, at least one of the users and each member of the group of users having a recipient terminal; associating a multimedia announcement file with an electronic message for events, the multimedia announcement file configured for playing at a recipient terminal upon occurrence of at least one of the event and the schedule of events wherein associating the multimedia announcement file with the electronic message for events comprises: the application of the sender terminal inspecting attributes of the least one of the event and the schedule of events; the application of the sender terminal determining and selecting the multimedia announcement file to associate with the electronic message for events from a plurality of announcement files by matching the attributes of the least one of the event and the schedule of events to attributes of the multimedia announcement file from the plurality of multimedia announcement files; an association function matches the attributes of the electronic message for events with at least one of the multimedia announcement files of the plurality of multimedia announcement files to include at least one multimedia announcement file with the electronic message, wherein associating an attribute of the electronic message with the multimedia announcement file includes using message urgency, a sender address and a subject of the electronic message to associate the electronic message with the at least one multimedia announcement file; wherein the multimedia announcement file includes a first bit defining one of a directly accessed multimedia announcement file or an address to the multimedia announcement file, a second bit defining the type of the multimedia announcement file and the multimedia announcement file compression parameters when compression parameters are defined, a third bit defining the types of indirect paths to the multimedia announcement file; wherein the attaching the multimedia announcement file to the electronic message includes defining an announcer identifier in a message header, the announcer identifier including a first bit defining the presence of an multimedia announcement file, a second bit defining the number of multimedia announcement files associated with the message; the application of the sender terminal associating the multimedia announcement file selected from the plurality of multimedia announcement files to the least one of the event and the schedule of events; and broadcasting the electronic message of events comprising the at least one of the event and the schedule of events over a network to the at least one of the user and the group of users.