Patent ID: 7490127

Claim:
In a network environment including a sending client computing system that is capable of transmitting network messages to each of a plurality of potential recipient client computing systems, the network environment also including a server computing system that is network connectable to the sending client computing system, a method for the server computing system to concurrently perform recipient resolution, in which at least one desired recipient is determined from a plurality of potential recipients, and certificate acquisition, in which information is obtained for encryption of a network message in a fashion that may be decrypted by a computing system of the at least one desired recipient and not by computing systems of other potential recipients, the method comprising steps of: receiving a first request from the sending client computing system, the first request including a search string input by a user of the sending client computing system for a search of recipient entries, and further requesting that the server computing system resolve the search string into an associated recipient entry; determining that the search string is ambiguous and cannot be resolved into a single associated recipient entry without further input from the user of the sending client computing system; identifying a plurality of different possible recipient entries that correspond to the ambiguous search string; for each of at least some of the plurality of different possible recipient entries, generating a token that uniquely identifies the possible recipient entry; sending each of the generated tokens to the sending client computing system to allow the user of the sending client computing system to select, from among the plurality of different possible recipient entries, a particular recipient entry corresponding to the at least one desired recipient; receiving a subsequent request from the sending client computing system, the subsequent request identifying a selected particular recipient entry of the plurality of different possible recipient entries using at least part of the token associated with the selected particular recipient entry; acquiring a certificate associated with the selected particular recipient entry using information from the at least part of the token; and sending the certificate to the sending client computing system.