On Wed, Mar 05, 2003 at 06:59:18PM -0500, Keith Moore wrote:
On Wed, 5 Mar 2003, Clifton Royston wrote:
People might want to look at the recently-implemented Postfix
sender verification feature in current snapshot releases.
This technique is patented and assigned to ESCOM Corporation, in US
Patent #6,321,267 (see the section "Active User Testing")
The patent was filed 23 November 1999; if you think you have prior
art, I encourage you to publish it.
for what it's worth, source code to do this has been available since at
least Jul 9, 1997 at ftp://cs.utk.edu/pub/moore/check_mail_addr.tar.gz
if this were enough to get this patent declared invalid, it would
make my day.
It probably is, in fact, since it was implemented and published more
than 1 year in advance of the patent filing date, but it typically
takes an actual lawsuit resulting from the holder demanding royalties
to do it. The patent system is pretty badly broken.
I also got a note on the Postfix list that exim has been implementing
this since at least 1998. (Apologies if that's code you were involved
with that they're talking about; can't tell the players without a
scorecard.)
-- Clifton
--
Clifton Royston -- LavaNet Systems Architect --
cliftonr(_at_)lava(_dot_)net
"If you ride fast enough, the Specialist can't catch you."
"What's the Specialist?" Samantha says.
"The Specialist wears a hat," says the babysitter. "The hat makes noises."
She doesn't say anything else.
Kelly Link, _The Specialist's Hat_
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