On Sun, Aug 29, 2004 at 11:27:21AM +0100, Nick Shelness wrote:
This disclosure in no way establishes the validity of this claim. This
awaits the issuance of a patent or patents, and the subsequent defense of
this patent or patents. Any individual or organization is free to write to
the patent authorities in any and all jurisdictions claiming that IP that
they believe has been submitted for patent protection is covered by "prior
art" or is "obvious", both of which are grounds for rejection of a patent
application.
Thanks for that information. I'm not familiar with the US procedures
to do so, so could you (or anyone else) give me details about how to
do this (address, formal requirements, costs,etc.).
their may
other earlier claims to the idea of extending [E]SMTP.
I do remember that something like this has been discussed earlier,
before MS published CallerID. The discussion was (I'm not sure until
I've searched my archives, but I think I raised the discusssion) about
the fact, that the sender address does not need to have the meaning of
a 'sender' or 'submitter' for RMX and RMX-alike proposals. Actually it
is just an abstract, meaningless pointer to any domain providing
a record covering the sender's IP address. As far as I can remember
I have proposed somewhere to just run the message header against a
regular expression and use just everything, which looks like an
e-mail address to find a domain covering the sending host, and allow
the sender to include just any arbitrary header line to include an
appropriate e-mail address.
Your/Microsoft's proposal is different in the way that it places the
'pointer' in the MAIL FROM:-command instead of the message header.
But from my point of view this is far away from reaching the invention
depth required for a patent. Even without the discussion I mentioned
I'd consider this idea as trivial (once RMX was published), and not
sufficient for a patent.
And, not to offend you, but to give my honest opinion:
Claiming a patent on such a minor and trivial 'invention' is unworthy
of any serious software company. Given the fact that Bill Gates was
still talking about making e-mails expensive and digital stamps a few
months ago, Microsoft must face the question why they didn't invent
anything on their own, but need to abuse such trivial
'microinventions' to hijack other people's ideas.
Hadmut Danisch