Patent ID: 8161120

Claim:
A method of populating a collaborative workspace with a plurality of user-specified elements of an electronic mail message, the method comprising the steps of: (i) assigning the electronic mail message to a collaborative workspace based on the said mail message, the workspace including a plurality of data groups accessible by a sender and/or one or more recipients of the electronic mail message; (ii) automatically identifying and obtaining each user-specified element of the plurality of user-specified elements from the electronic mail message; (iii) automatically associating each user-specified element with a said data group to enable the sender and/or the one or more recipients to collaborate on the user-specified elements; (iv) generating an unique message identifier using an input derived from content of the electronic mail message for identifying the electronic mail message; and (v) storing the identifier in association with each user-specified element after each user-specified element has been associated with the data group, and wherein each user-specified element associated with the respective data group is linked together contextually via the message identifier.