Patent ID: 7209955

Claim:
A method of replicating data items from a host system to a mobile data communication device, comprising the steps of: receiving a plurality of data items at the host system, wherein the plurality of data items are transmitted to the host system from a plurality of remote systems; characterizing the plurality of data items at the host system by the host system automatically determining a data item type and a data item priority for each of the received data items; generating an e-mail message for each of the received data items, wherein the e-mail message includes the received data item and a header that includes the data item type and the data item priority determined by the host system in the characterizing step; configuring a plurality of notification schemes at the mobile data communication device, wherein each of the plurality of notification schemes includes a plurality of notification fields that determine whether a particular notification scheme should be applied to a particular data item and an alert type, and wherein the plurality of notification fields include a party specific field that identifies a person associated with the data item, a data item type field that identifies a type of the data item, and a data item priority field that identifies a priority ranking of the data item; redirecting the e-mail messages from the host system to the mobile data communication device; recovering the data items, the data item types and the data item priorities from the redirected e-mail messages at the mobile data communication device; and applying the plurality of notification schemes to the redirected data items at the mobile data communication device by determining whether each data item and its characterized data item type and data item priority matches the party specific field, the data item type field and the data item priority field, respectively, of a particular notification scheme of the plurality of notification schemes, and if so, then enabling the alert type at the mobile data communication device for the particular notification scheme that matches the data item.