At 13:00 2007-08-29 -0600, LuKreme wrote:
did we already talk about this?
<http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?
Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%
2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=6411947.PN.&OS=PN/6411947&RS=PN/6411947>
[snip]
Anyway, the company holding this patent is suing a bunch of companies
now in Texas.
It occurs to me that there isn't anything in that Abstract that
procmail can't do.
Sure, but the patent is for some specific approach to doing it. For
procmail to accomplish those things, someone would need to sit down and
write the procmail recipes to evaluate messages.
Of course, that HAS been done time and again. There exist autoresponder
systems that look for keywords and fire back help documents, or forward the
message to an operator because no appropriate keywords were found. I
myself have a bunch of list management stuff (procmail in front of
Majordomo) to deal with different types of user submissions that are not
appropriate to lists (sending attachments - even specific types, requesting
receipts, sending apparent list commands to the list, etc), and providing
helptext specific to those issues, so that the user can self-correct rather
than waiting on a reply from a listadmin who received a bounce from the user.
Yea, I say "big whoopee" to some dolt who endeavours to PATENT such a thing
- and the idiots at the USPTO have repeatedly shown themselves to be
complete morons giving the stamp of approval to all manner of things which
are neither new or novel. "multimedia" was patented years after it was
commonplace, there are several conflicting patents for what amount to
hyperlinks (web or otherwise) as well.
---
Sean B. Straw / Professional Software Engineering
Procmail disclaimer: <http://www.professional.org/procmail/disclaimer.html>
Please DO NOT carbon me on list replies. I'll get my copy from the list.
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