Patent ID: 7565403

Claim:
A system that filters received messages, the system is recorded on a computer-readable storage medium and capable of execution by a computer, comprising: a bulk filter to categorize one or more received messages according to a range of classification, the range spanning from a bulk classification of values to a non-bulk classification of values, the bulk filter employs an expected urgency computation followed by a weighting computation to determine whether messages are bulk; at least a second filter to further classify the received messages in order to automatically facilitate processing of the messages, the second filter is an urgency filter that is employed to assign urgency scores, the urgency filter employs a utility model that assigns an expected cost of delayed review for urgent and non-urgent messages; and an importance filter that acts in parallel to the urgency filter and is employed to determine the importance of non-bulk messages; wherein the bulk filter computes a bulk score or discretized states of the bulk score, as a direct input to the second filter forming a cascaded filter, a classifier is then constructed that employs the bulk score to further classify the received messages; and a notification platform that directs prioritized messages to one or more notification sinks, the notification platform receives the prioritized messages and makes decisions regarding when, where, and how to notify a user by determining a current notification sink, likely location and likely focus of attention of the user, such that if a high importance e-mail is received, the notification platform determines the users location and reformats the message to the notification sink associated with the user and if a lower priority message is received, the notification platform configures to leave the e-mail in the user's in-box for later review as desired.