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UNITED STAlES PAlENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE United States Patent and Trademark Office Address: COMMISSIONER FOR PATENTS P.o. Box 1450 Alexandria, Virginia 22313-1450 www.uspto.gov

APPLICATION NO.

FILING DATE

FIRST NAMED INVENTOR

ATTORNEY DOCKET NO.

CONFIRMATION NO.

121208,902

09/1112008

Puneet K. Gupta

15000

3415

24739

7590

11118/2011

CENTRAL COAST PATENT AGENCY, INC 3 HANGAR WAY SUITE D WATSONVILLE, CA 95076

EXAMINER THATCHER, PAUL A ART UNIT

PAPER NUMBER

2172

NOTIFICATION DATE

DELIVERY MODE

11118/2011

ELECTRONIC

Please find below and/or attached an Office communication concerning this application or proceeding. The time period for reply, if any, is set in the attached communication. Notice of the Office communication was sent electronically on above-indicated "Notification Date" to the following e-mail addressees): officeactions@CENTRALCOASTPAlENT.COM plambuth@centralcoastpatent.com

PTOL-90A (Rev. 04/07)

Application No.

Applicant(s) GUPTA, PUNEET K.

12/208,902

Office Action Summary

Examiner

Art Unit

PAUL THATCHER

2172

-- The MAILING DA TE of this communication appears on the cover sheet with the correspondence address --

Period for Reply

A SHORTENED STATUTORY PERIOD FOR REPLY IS SET TO EXPIRE;2 MONTH(S) OR THIRTY (30) DAYS, WHICHEVER IS LONGER, FROM THE MAILING DATE OF THIS COMMUNICATION. Extensions of time may be available under the provisions of 37 CFR t. t 36(a). In no event, however, maya reply be timely filed after SIX (6) MONTHS from the mailing date of this communication. If NO period for reply is specified above, the maximum statutory period will apply and will expire SIX (6) MONTHS from the mailing date of this communication. Failure to reply within the set or extended period for reply will, by statute, cause the application to become ABANDONED (35 U.S.C. § t33). Any reply received by the Office later than three months after the mailing date of this communication, even if timely filed, may reduce any earned patent term adjustment. See 37 CFR t .704(b).

Status

1)1Z! Responsive to communication(s) filed on 06 September 2011. 2a)1Z! This action is FINAL.

2b)0 This action is non-final.

3)0 An election was made by the applicant in response to a restriction requirement set forth during the interview on _ _ ; the restriction requirement and election have been incorporated into this action. 4)0 Since this application is in condition for allowance except for formal matters, prosecution as to the merits is closed in accordance with the practice under Ex parte Quayle, 1935 C.D. 11,453 O.G. 213. Disposition of Claims

5)1Z! Claim(s) 1-4,6 and 11-15 is/are pending in the application. 5a) Of the above claim(s) _ _ is/are withdrawn from consideration. 6)0 Claim(s) _ _ is/are allowed. 7)1Z! Claim(s) 1-4,6 and 11-15 is/are rejected. 8)0 Claim(s) _ _ is/are objected to. 9)0 Claim(s) _ _ are subject to restriction and/or election requirement. Application Papers

10)0 The specification is objected to by the Examiner. 11)1Z! The drawing(s) filed on 11 September 2008 is/are: a)1Z! accepted or b)O objected to by the Examiner. Applicant may not request that any objection to the drawing(s) be held in abeyance. See 37 CFR 1.85(a). Replacement drawing sheet(s) including the correction is required if the drawing(s) is objected to. See 37 CFR 1.121 (d).

12)0 The oath or declaration is objected to by the Exam iner. Note the attached Office Action or form PTO-152. Priority under 35 U.S.C. § 119

13)0 Acknowledgment is made of a claim for foreign priority under 35 U.S.C. § 119(a)-(d) or (f). a)O All

b)O Some * c)O None of:

1.0 Certified copies of the priority documents have been received. 2.0 Certified copies of the priority documents have been received in Application No. _ _ ' 3.0 Copies of the certified copies of the priority documents have been received in this National Stage application from the International Bureau (PCT Rule 17.2(a)). * See the attached detailed Office action for a list of the certified copies not received.

Attachment{s) 1) 2) 3)

IZ! Notice of References Cited (PTO·892) 0 Notice of Draftsperson's Patent Drawing Review (PTO·948) 0 Information Disclosure Statement(s) (PTO/S8/08) Paper No(s)/Mail Date _ _ .

0 5) 0 6) 0 4)

Interview Summary (PTO·413) Paper No(s)/Mail Date. _ _ . Notice of Informal Patent Application Other: _ _ .

U.s. Patent and Trademark Office

PTOL·326 (Rev. 03·11)

Office Action Summary

Part of Paper No.lMail Date 20111108·8

Application/Control Number: 12/208,902

Page 2

Art Unit: 2172 DETAILED ACTION

Response to Amendment This communication is responsive to an amendment filed on September 6th , 2011.

Claims 1-4, 6, and 11-15 are pending in this application. Claims 1 and 11 are independent claims. In the amendment, Claims 1,6*, and 11 have been amended. Claims 5,7-10, and 16-18 have been cancelled. This action is Final. Examiner's Notes* Claim 6 was not amended in the paper work filed on September 6th , 2011. But Claim 6 depended upon Claim 5 which was cancelled. The Examiner called the Applicant's Representative on November 8th, 2011 and was informed that it was a typo and Claim 6 was intended to depend upon Claim 1. For the purposes of this office action it will be treated as if it was so amended. In future actions please make the appropriate corrections if this Claim is kept. In a separate note, Claim 1's markings identifying what have been removed and what has been added is incorrect. The following text was listed in original claims, but is missing from amended claims and is not struck out: "utility installed to and executable from the digital media and made accessible through the user interface; characterized in that the word tagging utility is"

Response to Arguments 1.

Applicant's arguments filed September 6th , 2011 have been fully considered.

Application/Control Number: 12/208,902

Page 3

Art Unit: 2172 2.

The accidental replacement of drawings has been noted and removed from the

record. Consequently, the objection regarding these drawings is withdrawn. 3.

The amendments are sufficient to overcome the rejection of the claims made

under 35 U.S.C. 101. Consequently, this rejection is withdrawn. 4.

As all the remaining independent claims have been amended, the previous

grounds of rejection based upon the prior art are moot and new grounds for rejection are set forth below.

Claim Rejections - 35 USC ยง 103 5.

The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 103(a) which forms the basis for all

obviousness rejections set forth in this Office action: (a) A patent may not be obtained though the invention is not identically disclosed or described as set forth in section 102 of this title, if the differences between the subject matter sought to be patented and the prior art are such that the subject matter as a whole would have been obvious at the time the invention was made to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which said subject matter pertains. Patentability shall not be negatived by the manner in which the invention was made.

Application/Control Number: 12/208,902

Page 4

Art Unit: 2172

Claims 1- 4, and 11-15 are rejected under 35 U.S.C.103(b) as being unpatentable over "Gmail Help Center", archived various dates in 2006-2007, downloaded May 16-17, 2011 and November 8, 2011 from the Internet WaybackMachine, http://reQlay:.web.arctlive.org/20070608080225/httg:l/mail.google.com/suPQDrt/?ctx:::abo ut (Gmail) in light of U.S. Patent Application Publication 2007/0290787 to Fiatal et al (Fiatal), in further view of U.S. Patent Application Publication 2005/0080770 to Lueder et al (Lueder).

Regarding Claim 1, Gmail teaches "A messaging application comprising: a computerized appliance; a non-transitory, machine-readable medium coupled to the computerized appliance; and software (SW) executing on the computerized appliance from the machine- readable medium, the SW providing:" (Gmail is a webmail service. See Page 1). Gmail teaches "the user interface enabling access to and display of one or more message folders, a list of contacts, a calendar," (Access to inbox and spam folders. See Page 5. Display and access to a contact list. See Page 17. Adding calendar items See Page 13). Gmail teaches "a message generation template; and an interactive information interface; and" (An email message form serves as a template allowing the user to add to, cc, bcc, subjects, and the body of a message. Gmail provides a form to facilitate sending an email message. See Page 20. Signature lines can be automatically added to the end of a message. See Page 14). Gmail teaches "and a word tagging utility operable to tag functional elements of the message application, including at least ... message folders;" (Gmail allows users to

Application/Control Number: 12/208,902

Page 5

Art Unit: 2172 label messages. See Page 8-9. Labels do all the work of folders. See Gmail, Page 8. Clicking on a label name on the left side of the page will show all messages with that label. See Page 8). Gmail doesn't appear to teach the tagging of contacts. Fiatal teaches the tagging of contacts. (See Fiatal, Paragraph 30). Messages exchanged with tagged contacts as associated with the tag. (See Fiatal, Paragraph 30).

It would have been obvious to a

person of ordinary skill in the art at the time of the invention to combine the teaching of Gmail and Fiatal because Fiatal teaches extending the Gmail service with its invention. See Fiatal, Paragraph 40. Gmail, as modified by Fiatal, teaches "wherein messages received from contacts that have one or more tags are deposited into message folders having like tags, and wherein the interactive information interface lists messages identified by tags associated with sender, and provides a summary of number of messages deposited in message folders by tag" (Messages exchanged with tagged contacts as associated with the tag. See Fiatal, Paragraph 30. Clicking on a label [tag] name on the left side of the page will show all messages with that label. See Gmail, Page 8. Labels show a message count for how many new messages listed under the label. See Gmail, Page 5, lower left corner.). Gmail, as modified by Fiatal, teaches messages may be searched or filtered by a period of time. See Gmail, Addendum, Page 1. Gmail, as modified by Fiatal, does not appear to teach the summary of the number of labeled message limited by a period of time. Lueder teaches the summary of

Application/Control Number: 12/208,902

Page 6

Art Unit: 2172 the number of results returned by a query can be organized based upon folders/labels. See Lueder, Paragraph 45. And such results can include counters of the number of items in such folders or sub-divisions. See Lueder, Figures 4 and 6; Paragraphs 49 and 51. It would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art at the time of the invention to combine Lueder's displaying of search results in a tree format reflecting the labels and using summary counters to Gmail's Advanced Search including time periods, because the tree view would allow users to search large amounts of information, while allowing the user to manageably navigate and further narrow their search results (See Lueder, Paragraph 4) while keeping the benefits of the users prior tagging of information. Additionally, both Gmail and Lueder deal with searching of messages. See Gmail, Addendum, Page 1; Lueder, Figure 4. Regarding Claim 2, Gmail teaches "wherein the user interface is an email

interface" (Gmail is a webmail service. See Gmail, Page 1). Gmail does not clearly teach "the computer system is a memory drive integral to the computing appliance" Fiatal teaches "the computer system is a memory drive integral to the computing appliance" (Modules and applications of the present invention may be unloaded and loaded by hardware and device drivers or integrated as part of an application specific component. See Fiatal, Paragraph 27). It would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art at the time of the invention to combine the teaching of Gmail and Fiatal because Fiatal teaches extending the Gmail service with its invention. See Fiatal, Paragraph 40.

Application/Control Number: 12/208,902

Page 7

Art Unit: 2172 Regarding Claim 3, Gmail teaches "wherein the user interface is an email interface and the computing system is a server with a digital medium accessible to the computing appliance over a data network." (Gmail is a webmail service. See Page 1. Email and chat from the same web browser wherever you have access to the Internet. See Page 2). Regarding Claim 4, Gmail teaches "the data network is the Internet network." (Email and chat from the same web browser wherever you have access to the Internet. See Page 2). Regarding Claim 11, Gmail doesn't clearly teach the tagging of contacts. Fiatal teaches "(a) using a tagging utility, tagging one or more individual contacts with one or more tags;" (See Fiatal, Paragraph 30). It would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art at the time of the invention to combine the teaching of Gmail and Fiatal to allow users to label or tag contacts in a similar manner as users can label or tag messages, because Fiatal teaches extending the Gmail service with its invention. See Fiatal, Paragraph 40. Gmail, as modified by Fiatal, teaches "A method for managing electronic messages comprising the steps: ... (b) tagging one or more existing or created message folders based in part on the tagging operation of step (a) defining associations between the contacts of step (a) and the message folders by one or more common tags;" (Labels do all the things that folders do but more. See Gmail, Page 8. Creating a label automatically associates the message with the folder like functionality of the label. See Gmail, Page 8). Gmail, as modified by Fiatal, teaches "(c) receiving electronic

Application/Control Number: 12/208,902

Page 8

Art Unit: 2172 messages from one or more tagged contacts;" (Gmail can receive emails. See Gmail Page 2. These messages may be from contacts that have been tagged. Emails may have included a subject line). Gmail, as modified by Fiatal, teaches "(d) routing the electronic messages to the one or more message folders based on the associations defined by the tagging operation." (Gmail allows users to label messages. See Page 89. Clicking on a label name on the left side of the page will show all messages with that label. See Page 8. If the message is from a tagged/labeled contact as described in Fiatal then the message would automatically appear in the label view.). Gmail, as modified by Fiatal, teaches "(e) listing in an interactive information interface messages identified by tags associated with sender, and providing in the interactive information interface a summary of number of messages deposited in message folders by tag" (Messages exchanged with tagged contacts as associated with the tag. See Fiatal, Paragraph 30. Clicking on a label [tag] name on the left side of the page will show all messages with that label. See Gmail, Page 8. Labels show a message count for how many new messages listed under the label. See Gmail, Page 5, lower left corner.). Gmail, as modified by Fiatal, teaches messages may be searched or filtered by a period of time (See Gmail, Addendum, Page 1). Gmail, as modified by Fiatal, does not appear to teach the summary of the number of labeled message limited by a period of time. Lueder teaches the summary of the number of results returned by a query can be organized based upon folders/labels. See Lueder, Paragraph 45. And such results can include counters of the number of

Application/Control Number: 12/208,902

Page 9

Art Unit: 2172 items in such folders or sub-divisions. See Lueder, Figures 4 and 6; Paragraphs 49 and 51. It would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art at the time of the invention to combine Lueder's displaying of search results in a tree format reflecting the labels and using summary counters to Gmail's Advanced Search including time periods, because the tree view would allow users to search large amounts of information, while allowing the user to manageably navigate and further narrow their search results (See Lueder, Paragraph 4) while keeping the benefits of the users prior tagging of information. Additionally, both Gmail and Lueder deal with searching of messages. See Gmail, Addendum, Page 1; Lueder, Figure 4. Regarding Claim 12, Gmail, as modified by Fiatal and Lueder, teaches "wherein the messages are email messages" (Gmail is an email and instant messaging service. See Gmail, Page 1). Gmail, as modified by Fiatal, teaches "the message sorting is performed by an email application" (messages are organized into conversations. See Page 21). Regarding Claim 13, Gmail, as modified by Fiatal and Lueder teaches "wherein in step (a) the tagging utility is executable through a control on a toolbar of a messaging application interface" (Gmail teaches the label or tagging of messages through use of a combo box at the top of the interface. See Gmail, Pages 8, 5, and 6. In light of the modification of Fiatal in adding the tagging of contacts as well, it would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art at the time of the invention to also make the tagging of contacts through a similar interface because such similarities make a product more intuitive for users to use.)

Application/Control Number: 12/208,902

Page 10

Art Unit: 2172

Regarding Claim 14, Gmail, as modified by Fiatal and Lueder teaches "wherein at step (d) the routing is performed after the message is read by a user, the final destination for routing dependent upon user acceptance or rejection of a folder recommendation" (Gmail allow users to edit labels on messages. See Gmail, Pages 8, 9, and 23. This editing includes adding new labels and deleting old ones. See 10. This can be done before during or after reading the message. Since the folder/label that the message will end up in depends on what the user ultimately decides (See Gmail Page 8), and since the message may have initially been label because of a contact. All elements of this claim are met.)

Regarding Claim 15 Gmail teaches "wherein in step (d) the routing is performed immediately after a message has arrived and before it is accessed by a user." (As discussed in Claim 11, Clicking on a label name on the left side of the page will show all messages with that label. See Page 8. If the message is from a tagged/labeled contact as described in Fiatal then the message would automatically appear in the label view. Additionally, Users can create filters to label messages in their account based on sender, recipients, and more and set such filters to work automatically. See Gmail, Page 10)

Claims 6 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103(b) as being unpatentable over "Gmail

Help Center", archived various dates in 2007, downloaded May 16-17,2011 from the Internet WaybackMachine, httg:/lreQla:{web.archive.org/20070608080225/httQ:/lmail.google.com/suQQort/?ctx::::abo ut (Gmail), in light of U.S. Patent Application Publication 2007/0290787 to Fiatal et al

Application/Control Number: 12/208,902

Page 11

Art Unit: 2172 (Fiatal), and in light of U.S. Patent Application Publication 2005/0080770 to Lueder et al (Lueder) in further view of U.S. Patent Application Publication 2007/0244892 to Narancic (Narancic). Regarding Claim 6, Gmail, as modified by Fiatal, and Lueder, doesn't appear to

teach labeling appointments and related pending tasks. Narancic teach "the functional elements subject to tagging further include scheduled appointments and related tasks pending". ("The matter tags and generated e-mail addresses are used to associate items (e.g., e-mails, calendars, notes, tasks, reminders, documents, and others) with a given matter". See Narancic, Paragraph 35). It would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art at the time of the invention to learn from Narancic the tagging of appointments and related tasks; because projects may involve items of different types that would be more easily handled if there was a way to keep items associated together. See Narancic Paragraph 3, 4, and 25.

Conclusion 7.

Applicant's amendment necessitated the new ground(s) of rejection presented in

this Office action. Accordingly, THIS ACTION IS MADE FINAL. See MPEP

ยง 706.07(a). Applicant is reminded of the extension of time policy as set forth in 37 CFR 1.136(a). A shortened statutory period for reply to this final action is set to expire THREE MONTHS from the mailing date of this action. In the event a first reply is filed within TWO MONTHS of the mailing date of this final action and the advisory action is not

Application/Control Number: 12/208,902

Page 12

Art Unit: 2172 mailed until after the end of the THREE-MONTH shortened statutory period, then the shortened statutory period will expire on the date the advisory action is mailed, and any extension fee pursuant to 37 CFR 1.136(a) will be calculated from the mailing date of the advisory action. In no event, however, will the statutory period for reply expire later than SIX MONTHS from the date of this final action. 8.

The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to

applicant's disclosure. "Fringe Contacts: People-Tagging for the Enterprise", Stephen Farrell and Tessa Lau, IBM Almaden Research Center Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to PAUL THATCHER whose telephone number is (571 )270-331 O. The examiner can normally be reached on Monday thru Friday 9:00am to 5:30pm. If attempts to reach the examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the examiner's supervisor, Boris Pesin can be reached on (571 )272-4070. The fax phone number for the organization where this application or proceeding is assigned is 571-273-8300.

Application/Control Number: 12/208,902

Page 13

Art Unit: 2172 Information regarding the status of an application may be obtained from the Patent Application Information Retrieval (PAIR) system. Status information for published applications may be obtained from either Private PAl R or Public PAl R. Status information for unpublished applications is available through Private PAIR only. For more information about the PAIR system, see http://pair-direct.uspto.gov. Should you have questions on access to the Private PAIR system, contact the Electronic Business Center (EBC) at 866-217-9197 (toll-free). If you would like assistance from a USPTO Customer Service Representative or access to the automated information system, call 800-786-9199 (IN USA OR CANADA) or 571-272-1000. /PT/ /NAMITHA PILLAI/ Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2172

Application/Control No.

Notice of References Cited

12/208,902

Applicant(s)/Patent Under Reexamination GUPTA, PUNEET K.

Examiner

Art Unit

PAUL THATCHER

2172

Page 1 of 1

U.S. PATENT DOCUMENTS

* *

Document Number Country Code-Number-Kind Code

US-2005/0080770

US-

Date MM-YYYY 04-2005

Name

Classification

Lueder et al.

707/003

FOREIGN PATENT DOCUMENTS

Document Number

Country Code-Number-Kind Code

Date MM-YYYY

Country

Name

Classification

N 0

P Q

R S

T NON-PATENT DOCUMENTS

Include as applicable: Author, Title Date, Publisher, Edition or Volume, Pertinent Pages)

"Gmail Help Center", archived various dates in 2006-2007, downloaded November 8,2011 from the Internet WaybackMachine, http://replay.web.archive.org/20070608080225/http://maiI.google.com/support/?ctx=about (Gmail) - Addendum

*A copy of this reference IS not being furnished with this Office action. (See MPEP ยง 707.05(a).) Dates in MM-YYYY format are publication dates. Classifications may be US or foreign. U.s. Patent and Trademark Office

PTO-892 (Rev. 01-2001)

Notice of References Cited

Part of Paper No. 20111108-8

Search Notes

Application/Control No.

Appl icant( s)/Patent Under Reexam ination

12208902

GUPTA, PUNEET K.

Examiner

Art Unit

PAUL THATCHER

2172

SEARCHED Class 715

I I 748 with key words

Subclass

I I

Date 5/13/2011

I Examiner I IPTI

SEARCH NOTES Search Notes

Date

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Examiner IPTI IPTI IPTI IPTI

5/13/2011 5/14/2011 11/8/2011 11/8/2011

INTERFERENCE SEARCH Class

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U.S. Patent and Trademark Office

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How do I use Advanced Search? Advanced search operators are query words or symbols that perform special actions in Gmail search. These operators allow you to find what you're looking for quickly and accurately. They can also be used to set up filters so you can organize your inbox automatically. Some of the most useful operators are listed below.

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Operator

Definition

Example(s)

Used to specify the sender

Example - from:amy Meaning - Messages from Amy

to:

Used to specify a recipient

Example - to:david Meaning - All messages that were sent to David (by you or someone else)

subject:

Search for words in the subject line

Example - subject:dinner Meaning - Messages that have the word "dinner" in the subject

Search for messages matching term A or term B*

Example - from:amy OR from:david Meaning - Messages from Amy or from David

Used to exclude messages from your search

from:

(hyphen)

*OR must be in all caps

.Protect your Grnail account .. Report abuse ancj learn more about

safeguarding your information.

Example - dinner -movie Meaning - Messages that contain the word "dinner" but do not contain the word "movie" Example - from:amy label :friends Meaning - Messages from Amy that have the label "friends"

label:

has:attachment

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Search for messages with an attachment

Example - from:david label:myfamily Meaning - Messages from David that have the label "My Family" Example - from:david has :attachment Meaning - Messages from David that have an attachment Example fi lename :physicshomework.txt Meaning - Messages with an attachment named "physicshomework.txt"

filename:

Search for an attachment by name or type Example - label :work filename:pdf Meaning - Messages labeled "work" that also have a PDF file as an attachment Example - "i'm feeling lucky" Meaning - Messages containing the phrase "i'm feeling lucky" or "I'm feeling lucky"

Used to search for an exact phrase*

(quotes)

*Capitalization isn't taken into consideration

()

Used to group words Used to specify terms that shouldn't be excluded

Example - subject:"dinner and a movie" Meaning - Messages containing the phrase "dinner and a movie" in the subject Example - from:amy(dinner OR movie) Meaning - Messages from Amy that contain either the word "dinner" or the word "movie" Example - subject:(dinner movie) Meaning - Messages in which

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11/8/2011

Gmail: Help Center - How do I use Advanced Search?

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the subject contains both the word "dinner" and the word "movie"

in :anywhere

in:inbox in:trash in:spam is:starred is:unread is:read ee: bee:

after: before:

Search for messages anywhere in your account* *Messages in Spam and Trash are excluded from searches by default

Example - in:anywhere subjeet:movie Meaning - Messages in All Mail, Spam, and Trash that contain the word "movie"

Search for messages in Inbox, Trash, or Spam

Example - in:trash from:amy Meaning - Messages from Amy that are in Trash

Search for messages that are starred, unread or read

Example - is:read is:starred from:David Meaning - Messages from David that have been read and are marked with a star

Used to specify recipients in the ee: or bee: fields* *Search on bee: cannot retrieve messages on which you were blind carbon copied

Search for messages sent during a certain period of time* *Dates must be in yyyy/mm/dd format.

Example - ee:david Meaning - Messages that were cc-ed to David Example - after:2004/04/16 before :2004/04118 Meaning - Messages sent after April 16, 2004, but before April 18, 2004.* *More precisely: Messages sent on April 17. 2004.

If you can't find your answer by searching or browsing our Help Center, please contact us.

ÂŠ2006 Google

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11/8/2011

EAST Search History

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EAST Search History

11/8/20119:16:48 PM C:\ Users\ pthatcher\ Documents\ EAST\ Workspaces\ 12208902.wsp

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Index of Claims

Application/Control No.

Appl icant( s )/Patent Under Reexam i nation

12208902

GUPTA, PUNEET K.

Examiner

Art Unit

PAUL THATCHER

2172

Rejected

Cancelled

Allowed

Restricted

Non-Elected

Appeal

Interference

Objected

D T.D.

Claims renumbered in the same order as presented by applicant

CLAIM Final

CPA

R.1.47

DATE

Original

05/19/2011 11/08/2011

1 2 3 4

5 6 7 8

10 11 12

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U.S. Patent and Trademark Office

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Part of Paper No. : 20t t t t 08-8

To: From: Cc: Subject:

officeactions@CENTRALCOASTPATENT.COM, plambuth@centralcoastpatent.com, PAIR_eOfficeAction@uspto.gov PAIR_eOfficeAction@uspto.gov Private PAIR Correspondence Notification for Customer Number 24739

Nov 18,2011 05:19:32 AM Dear PAIR Customer: CENTRAL COAST PATENT AGENCY, INC 3 HANGAR WAY SUITE D WATSONVILLE, CA 95076 UNITED STATES The following USPTO patent application(s) associated with your Customer Number, 24739 , have new outgoing correspondence. This correspondence is now available for viewing in Private PAIR. The official date of notification of the outgoing correspondence will be indicated on the form PTOL-90 accompanying the correspondence. Disclaimer: The list of documents shown below is provided as a courtesy and is not part of the official file wrapper. The content of the images shown in PAIR is the official record. Application 12208902

Document CTFR 892

Mailroom Date 11/18/2011 11/18/2011

Attorney Docket No. 15000 15000

To view your correspondence online or update your email addresses, please visit us anytime at https:llsportal.uspto.gov/secure/myportal/privatepair. If you have any questions, please email the Electronic Business Center (EBC) at EBC@uspto.gov with 'e-Office Action' on the subject line or call 1-866-217-9197 during the following hours: Monday - Friday 6:00 a.m. to 12:00 a.m. Thank you for prompt attention to this notice, UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE PATENT APPLICATION INFORMATION RETRIEVAL SYSTEM

IN THE UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE Art Unit: 2172 Examiner: Thatcher, Paul

InRe: Case: Serial No.: Filed: Subject:

Puneet K. Gupta 15000 121208,902 September 11, 2008 System for Creating Associations between Elements of a Message Application

Commissioner for Patents PO Box 1450 Alexandria, VA 22313-1450

Dear Sir:

Response A

-2In the Claims

All of the claims standing for examination are reproduced below with appropriate status indication.

1. (Currently amended) A messaging application comprising: a computerized appliance; a non-transitory, machine-readable medium coupled to the computerized appliance; and software (SW) executing on the computerized appliance from the machinereadable medium, the SW providing: a user interface mcccutable from a digital media on a computing system onboard or accessible to a computing appliance, the user interface enabling display and access to and display of one or more message folders, a list of contacts, a calendar, and a message generation template, and an interactive information interface; and a word tagging utility installed to and mcccutable from the digital media and made accessible through the user interface operable to tag functional elements of the message application, including at least contacts and message folders; wherein messages received from contacts that have one or more tags are deposited into message folders having like tags, and wherein the interactive information interface lists messages identified by tags associated with sender, and provides a summary of number of messages deposited in message folders by tag for a period of time entered by a user characterized in that the '.vord tagging utility is operable to tag functional elements of the message application to create associations between the tagged elements, the associations recognized by the messaging application in the performance of tasks iWlolving the elements.

-32. (Original) The messaging application of claim 1 wherein the user interface is an email interface and the computing system is a memory drive integral to the computing appliance.

3. (Original) The messaging system of claim 1 wherein the user interface is an email interface and the computing system is a server with a digital medium accessible to the computing appliance over a data network.

4. (Original) The system of claim 3 wherein the data network is the Internet network.

5. (Cancelled)

6. (Original) The messaging application of claim 5 wherein the functional elements subject to tagging further include scheduled appointments and related tasks pending.

7-10. (Cancelled)

11. (Currently amended) A method for routing managing electronic messages comprising the steps of: (a) using a tagging utility, tagging one or more individual contacts with one or more tags; (b) tagging one or more existing or created message folders based in part on the tagging operation of step (a) defining associations between the contacts of step (a) and the message folders by one or more common tags; (c) receiving an electronic message messages from one or more ef.the tagged contacts the message including a subj ect line and a from identity; and (d) routing the electronic message messages to the one or more message folders based on the associations defined by the tagging operation; and

-4(e) listing in an interactive information interface messages identified by tags associated with sender, and providing in the interactive information interface a summary of number of messages deposited in message folders by tag for a period of time entered by a user.

12. (Original) The method of claim 11 wherein the messages are email messages and the message sorting is performed by an email application.

13. (Original) The method of claim 11 wherein in step (a) the tagging utility is executable through a control on a toolbar of a messaging application interface.

14. (Original) The method of claim 11 wherein at step (d) the routing is performed after the message is read by a user, the final destination for routing dependent upon user acceptance or rejection of a folder recommendation.

15. (Original) The method of claim 11 wherein in step (d) the routing is performed immediately after a message has arrived and before it is accessed by a user.

16-18. (Cancelled)

-5-

REMARKS

This response is to the Office Action mailed on OS/27/2011.

From the action:

This action is a non-final action

III

response to communication filed on 11

September 2008. Claims 1-18 are pending in the application. Claims 1-18 are rejected. The drawings filed on 19 December 2008 are objected to by the Examiner.

Applicant's response:

Acknowledged

From the action:

Drawings

The drawings were received on 12/29/2008. According to the Specification the invention is entitled "SYSTEM FOR CREATING ASSOCIATIONS BETWEEN ELEMENTS OF A MESSAGE APPLICATION" and these drawings are supposed to be for email interface application and a calendar interface. The note accompanying the drawings state they are replacements for "DRILLING RISER AUXILIARY CLAMP WITH INTEGRAL MUX CLAMP", and while the application number 12/208,902 does match this application the title and subject matter do not. The Examiner believes these drawing are intended for another application and that the Applicant intended to keep the original Figures 6 and 7.

Applicant's response:

The examiner is correct, and the applicant apologizes for the confusion. The replacement sheets for Figs. 6 and 7 are in error, and the applicant wishes to keep original Figs. 6 and 7. The replacement sheets were not filed by the applicant in the present case, but by another practitioner in another case by mistake, by his using our SIN which is

-6similar to that of his own case. We have informed that practitioner so he may file his drawings in his own case.

From the action:

Claim Rejections - 35 USC ยง 101 Claims 1-10 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 101 because the claimed invention is directed to non-statutory subject matter. Regarding Claim 1, Claim 1 does not necessarily recite any hardware. The claim appears to be defining software. Software per se is not statutory subject matter and therefore is not patentable. See In re Bilski. While the claim recites "digital media", "computer system", and "computing appliance" it does so in a way that does not require any of these elements. In reference to computer readable media and by relation digital media questions also arise regarding whether such media includes signals per se which are also unpatentable as nonstatutory subject matter. See In re Nuijten. While the claim recites "a user interface ", "a list of contacts", and "a calendar" these components can all be rendered as pure software. The Claim does not appear to be a method claim or a composition of matter claim. The Claim specifies no hardware. So the claim does not qualify as a apparatus or article of manufacture. Since in this case no elements of physical structure are listed, the recited invention is computer software per se and is not a "process," a "machine," a "manufacture," or a "composition of matter," as defined in 35 U.S.C. 101. Thus, Claim 1 fails to recite statutory subject matter. Dependant claims may be patentable if they include sufficient structure to bring it within a statutory class. The applicant may overcome this rej ection by amending the claim to read "a user interface executing from instructions stored on a non-transitory digital media". Regarding Claims 2-4, Claim 2-4 recite "the computing system is a memory drive integral to the computing appliance", "the computing system is a server", and "the data network is the Internet network". As discussed earlier the computer system and computing appliance of Claim 1 are recited as optional features. The recitation of a

-7optional elements are not sufficient to make these claims patentable subject matter. Additionally, "a server" is broad enough to include pure software. Therefore it is not sufficient to make this claim patentable subject matter. Regarding Claims 5-6, Claims 5-6 do not necessarily add any physically elements. Therefore these additions are not sufficient to make these claims patentable subject matter. Regarding Claim 7, has similar deficiencies as Claim 1 and is rejected under similar analysis. A "system" can be interpreted broadly enough to include pure software. Regarding Claims 8 and 9, Claims 8-9 are similar to Claims 2-3 and are rejected under a similar analysis. Regarding Claim 10, Claim 10 does not necessarily add any physically elements. Therefore these additions are not sufficient to make this claim patentable subject matter.

Applicant's response: Applicant has amended the independent claims left standing in a manner to overcome the rejections under 35 U.S.C. 101, and respectfully requests that the rejections be withdrawn.

From the action:

Claim Rejections - 35 USC ยง 102 Claims 1, 3, 4, 17 and 18 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 102(a) as being anticipated by "Gmail Help Center", archived various dates in 2007, downloaded May 16-17, 2011 from the Internet WaybackMachine, http://replay. web. archive.org12007 0608080225/http://mail. google. com!support!? ct x=about (Gmail). With respect to Claim 1, Gmail teaches "A messaging application comprising: a user interface executable from a digital media on a computing system onboard or accessible to a computing appliance," (Gmail is a webmail service. See Page 1). Gmail teaches "the user interface enabling display and access to one or more message folders, a

-8list of contacts, a calendar," (Access to inbox and spam folders. See Page 5. Display and access to a contact list. See Page 17. Adding calendar items See Page 13). Gmail teaches "a message generation template;" (An email message form serves as a template allowing the user to add to, cc, bcc, subjects, and the body of a message. Gmail provides a form to facilitate sending an email message. See Page 20. Signature lines can be automatically added to the end of a message. See Page 14). Gmail teaches "and a word tagging utility installed to and executable from the digital media and made accessible through the user interface; characterized in that the word tagging utility is operable to tag functional elements of the message application to create associations between the tagged elements, the associations recognized by the messaging application in the performance of tasks involving the elements" (Gmail allows users to label messages. See Page 8-9. Clicking on a label name on the left side of the page will show all messages with that label. See Page 8). With respect to Claim 3, Gmail teaches "wherein the user interface is an email interface and the computing system is a server with a digital medium accessible to the computing appliance over a data network." (Gmail is a webmail service. See Page 1. Email and chat from the same web browser wherever you have access to the Internet. See Page 2). With respect to Claim 4, Gmail teaches "the data network is the Internet network." (Email and chat from the same web browser wherever you have access to the Internet. See Page 2). With respect to Claim 17, Gmail teaches "A method for routing electronic messages comprising the steps: (a) using a tagging utility, tagging one or more existing or created message folders" (Gmail allows users to create labels. See Page 8. Labels are like folders but with extra features. See Page 8. Messages can be labeled (i.e. tagged), which will cause the tagged message to appear in a view will all other similarly tagged messages when the tag is clicked on from the left side of the screen. See Page 8.) Gmail teaches "defining associations between messaging contacts of a contact list and the message folders; (b) receiving an electronic message from one or more of the contacts the

-9message including a subject line and a from identity; and (c) routing the electronic message to the one or more message folders based on parsing the subject line of the message and matching that to the tags for one or more message folders" (Gmail allows users to set up filters to automatically label mail based on senders, keywords, and more. See Page 10. Filter options include subject criteria. See Page 22. Messages that are labeled will show up whenever the label is clicked on the left hand side of the screen. See Page 8.) With respect to Claim 18, Gmail teaches "in step (b) one or more parts of the identity of the message originator are used to define the association to an existing or created folder also tagged with one or more parts of the identity"

Claim Rejections - 35 USC ยง 103

Claims 6 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103(b) as being unpatentable over "Gmail Help Center", archived various dates in 2007, downloaded May 16-17, 2011 from the Internet Wayback Machine, htm_~iiI~p-I~Y:_l;Y:~Q:_~rยฃhiY_~:_QI~i~QQ1Q~QQQQQ~~~lhttP-;lLmยงjLgQQgI~_&QJ!!L~Jm'p-_Ql1n_~t~=~!l?_QJJJ

(Gmail) in light of U.S. Patent Application Publication 2007/0244892 to Narancic (Narancic). Regarding Claim 6, Gmail doesn't appear to teach labeling appointments and related pending tasks. Narancic teach "the functional elements subject to tagging further include scheduled appointments and related tasks pending". ("The matter tags and generated e-mail addresses are used to associate items (e.g., e-mails, calendars, notes, tasks, reminders, documents, and others) with a given matter". See Narancic, Paragraph 35). It would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art at the time of the invention to combing the teaching of Gmail and Narancic, because projects may involve items of different types that would be more easily handled if there was a way to keep items associated together. See Narancic Paragraph 3, 4 and 25.

- 10 Claims 2, 5 and 7-16 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103(b) as being unpatentable over "Gmail Help Center", archived various dates in 2007, downloaded May 16-17,2011 from the Internet WaybackMachine, http://replav. web. archive .org/200 7 0608080225/http://mail. google. com/ support/? ctx=a bout

(Gmail) in light of U.S. Patent Application Publication 2007/02900787 to Fiatal et al (Fiatal). With respect to Claim 2, Gmail teaches "wherein the user interface is an email interface" (Gmail is a webmail service. See Gmail, Page 1). Gmail does not clearly teach "the computer system is a memory drive integral to the computing appliance" Fiatal teaches "the computer system is a memory drive integral to the computing appliance" (Modules and applications of the present invention may be unloaded and loaded by hardware and device drivers or integrated as part of an application specific component. See Fiatal, Paragraph 27). It would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art at the time of the invention to combine the teaching of Gmail and Fiatal because Fiatal teaches extending the Gmail service with its invention. See Fiatal, Paragraph 40. Regarding Claim 5, Gmail teaches "the functional elements subject to tagging include at least message folders" (Labels do all the work of folders. See Gmail, Page 8. To view all the messages with a particular label, click on that label along the left side of any Gmail page). Gmail doesn't appear to teach the tagging of contacts. Fiatal teaches the tagging of contacts. (See Fiatal, Paragraph 30). It would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art at the time of the invention to combine the teaching of Gmail and Fiatal because Fiatal teaches extending the Gmail service with its invention. See Fiatal, Paragraph 40. Regarding Claim 7, Claim 7 is similar in scope as Claim 1 and is rejected under similar analysis with the possible exception of the limitation "a database for storing tag words and for mapping associations between tagged elements".

- 11 -

Gmail teaches "mapping associations between tagged elements" (Gmail allows users to label messages. See Page 8-9. Clicking on a label name on the left side of the page will show all messages with that label. See Page 8). Gmail doesn't explicitly teach database for storing tagged words. Fiatal teaches "a database for storing tag words" (Contact database sorted by tag. See Fiatal, Paragraph 45). It would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art at the time of the invention to combine the teaching of Gmail and Fiatal because Fiatal teaches extending the Gmail service with its invention. See Fiatal, Paragraph 40. Regarding Claim 8, Claim 8 is the same in scope as Claim 2 and is rejected

under the same analysis. Regarding Claim 9, Claim 9 is the same in scope as Claim 3 and is rejected

under the same analysis. Regarding Claim 10, Gmail, as modified by Fiatal, teaches "one of the specific

tasks is routing email messages based on tag associations between from identities and message folders. (Gmail allows users to label messages. See Page 8-9. Clicking on a label name on the left side of the page will show all messages with that label. See Page 8). Regarding Claim 11, Gmail doesn't clearly teach the tagging of contacts. Fiatal

teaches "(a) using a tagging utility, tagging one or more individual contacts with one or more tags;" (See Fiatal, Paragraph 30). It would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art at the time of the invention to combine the teaching of Gmail and Fiatal to allow users to label or tag contacts in a similar manner as users can label or tag message, because Fiatal teaches extending the Gmail service with its invention. See Fiatal, Paragraph 40. Gmail, as modified by Fiatal, teaches "A method for routing electronic messages comprising the steps:... (b) tagging one or more existing or created message folders based in part on the tagging operation of step (a) defining associations between the contacts of step (a) and the message folders by one or more common tags;" (Labels do all the things that folders do but more. See Gmail, Page 8. Creating a label automatically associates the message with the folder like functionality of the label. See Gmail, Page 8).

- 12 Gmail, as modified by Fiatal, teaches "(c) receiving an electronic message from one or more of the contacts the message including a subject line and a from identity;" (Gmail can receive emails. See Gmail Page 2. These messages may be from contacts that have been tagged. Emails may have included a subject line). Gmail, as modified by Fiatal, teaches "(d) routing the electronic message to the one or more message folders based on the associations defined by the tagging operation." (Gmail allows users to label messages. See Page 8-9. Clicking on a label name on the left side of the page will show all messages with that label. See Page 8. If the message is from a tagged/labeled contact as described in Fiatal then the message would automatically appear in the label view.) With respect to Claim 12, Gmail, as modified by Fiatal, teaches "wherein the messages are email messages" (Gmail is an email and instant messaging service. See Gmail, Page 1). Gmail, as modified by Fiatal, teaches "the message sorting is performed by an email application" (messages are organized into conversations. See Page 21). With respect to Claim 13, Gmail, as modified by Fiatal, teaches "wherein in step (a) the tagging utility is executable through a control on a toolbar of a messaging application interface" (Gmail teaches the label or tagging of messages through use of a combo box at the top of the interface. See Gmail, Pages 8, 5, and 6. In light of the modification of Fiatal in adding the tagging of contacts as well, it would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art at the time of the invention to also make the tagging of contacts through a similar interface because such similarities make a product more intuitive for users to use.) With respect to Claim 14, Gmail, as modified by Fiatal, teaches "wherein at step (d) the routing is performed after the message is read by a user, the final destination for routing dependent upon user acceptance or rejection of a folder recommendation" (Gmail allow users to edit labels on messages. See Gmail, Pages 8, 9, and 23. This editing includes adding new labels and deleting old ones. See ID. This can be done before during or after reading the message. Since the folder/label that the message will end up in depends on what the user ultimately decides (See Gmail Page 8), and since the message may have initially been label because of a contact. All elements of this claim are met.)

- 13 -

With respect to Claim 15 Gmail teaches "wherein in step (d) the routing is performed immediately after a message has arrived and before it is accessed by a user." (As discussed in Claim 11, Clicking on a label name on the left side of the page will show all messages with that label. See Page 8. If the message is from a tagged/labeled contact as described in Fiatal then the message would automatically appear in the label view. Additionally, Users can create filters to label messages in their account based on sender, recipients, and more and set such filters to work automatically. See Gmail, Page 10)

With respect to Claim 16, Gmail, as modified by Fiatal, teaches "steps (a) and (b) are performed automatically a first time by crawling through a personal folder containing one or more folders and a list of contacts" (Users can create filters to label messages in their account based on sender, recipients, and more. See Gmail, Page 10).

Applicant's response: The applicant is impressed with the references cited and applied, and in the examiner's rationale in applying the references. There are, however, certain features of applicant's invention not claimed, but well-enabled in the specification and drawings, that are patentable over the references cited and applied.

These features relate to an

interactive information interface provided in a messaging application wherein contacts and message folders are tagged, and messages are deposited into folders based on tags common to senders of messages and the folders. These features are enabled in applicant's Fig. 6 and the description of Fig. 6 in the as-filed specification, beginning on about page 23.

Applicant has therefore amended independent claims 1 and 11 to recite these salient features as follows:

1. (Currently amended) A messaging application comprising:

a computerized appliance;

- 14 a non-transitory, machine-readable medium coupled to the computerized appliance; and software (SW) executing on the computerized appliance from the machinereadable medium, the SW providing: a user interface enabling access to and display of one or more message folders, a list of contacts, a calendar, a message generation template, and an interactive information interface; and a word tagging utility operable to tag functional elements of the message application, including at least contacts and message folders; wherein messages received from contacts that have one or more tags are deposited into message folders having like tags, and wherein the interactive information interface lists messages identified by tags associated with sender, and provides a summary of number of messages deposited in message folders by tag for a period of time entered by a user.

11. (Original) A method for managing electronic messages comprising the steps of: (a) using a tagging utility, tagging one or more individual contacts with one or more tags; (b) tagging one or more existing or created message folders based in part on the tagging operation of step (a) defining associations between the contacts of step (a) and the message folders by one or more common tags; (c) receiving electronic messages from one or more tagged contacts; (d) routing the electronic messages to the one or more message folders based on the associations defined by the tagging operation; and (e) listing in an interactive information interface messages identified by tags associated with sender, and providing in the interactive information interface a summary of number of messages deposited in message folders by tag for a period of time entered by a user.

- 15 Applicant is confident that the inclusion of the information interface and its function distinguishes claims 1 and 11 from the art cited and applied, taken either singly or in combination. Claims 5, 7-10 and 16-18 are cancelled. Claims 2-4, 5-6, and 12-15 are therefore patentable on their merits, or at least as depended from a patentable claim.

Summary As all of the claims left standing, as amended and argued above, have been shown to be patentable over the art cited and applied, applicant respectfully requests reconsideration and that the case be passed quickly to issue. If any fees are due beyond fees paid with this amendment, authorization is made to deduct those fees from deposit account 50-0534. If any time extension is needed beyond any extension requested with this amendment, such extension is hereby requested.

Respectfully Submitted Puneet K. Gupta By /1)onaCd 9l. 910!J4/ Donald R. Boys Reg. No. 35,074

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Electronic Patent Application Fee Transmittal Application Number:

12208902

Filing Date:

11-Sep-2008

Title of Invention:

System for Creating Associations Between Elements of a Message Application

First Named Inventor/Applicant Name:

Puneet K. Gupta

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System for Creating Associations Between Elements of a Message Application

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Puneet K. Gupta

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Application Number 12/208,902 For

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(Column 2)

FOR

NUMBER FILED

NUMBER EXTRA

RATE ($)

BASIC FEE (37 CFR 1.16(a), (b), or (e))

N/A

SEARCH FEE (37 CFR 116(k), (i), or (m))

N/A

EXAMINATION FEE (37 CFR 1.16(0), (p), or (q))

N/A

TOTAL CLAIMS (37 CFR 1.16(i))

minus 20 =

INDEPENDENT CLAIMS (37 CFR 1.16(h))

minus 3 =

DAPPLICATION SIZE FEE (37 CFR 1.16(s))

D To be Mailed

. .

SMALL ENTITY

FEE ($)

SMALL ENTITY RATE ($)

FEE ($)

If the specification and drawings exceed 1 00 sheets of paper, the application size fee due is $250 ($125 for small entity) for each additional 50 sheets or fraction thereof. See 35 U.S.C. 41 (a)(1)(G) and 37 CFR 1.16(s).

D MULTIPLE DEPENDENT CLAIM PRESENT (37 CFR 1.16(j)) • If the difference in column 1 is less than zero, enter "0" in column 2.

TOTAL

APPLICATION AS AMENDED - PART II OTHER THAN

f--

09/06/2011

W ~

Total

0 Z

Independent

W ~

(37 CFR

1.16(i)) 37CFR1.16h))

(Column 1)

(Column 2)

(Column 3)

CLAIMS REMAINING AFTER AMENDMENT

HIGHEST NUMBER PREVIOUSLY PAID FOR

PRESENT EXTRA

SMALL ENTITY

RATE ($)

Total

(37 CFR

1.161ill

Independent

0 Z

(37CFR 1.16(h))

RATE ($)

Minus

.. 20

X $26 =

X $

•2

Minus

"'4

X $110 =

X $

D Application Size Fee (37 CFR 1.16(s)) D FIRST PRESENTATION OF MULTIPLE DEPENDENT CLAIM (37 CFR

ADDITIONAL FEE ($)

SMALL ENTITY

• 10

(Column 1)

(Column 2)

(Column 3)

CLAIMS REMAINING AFTER AMENDMENT

HIGHEST NUMBER PREVIOUSLY PAID FOR

PRESENT EXTRA

· ·

Minus Minus

.. ...

D Application Size Fee (37 CFR 1.16(s)) « D FIRST PRESENTATION OF MULTIPLE DEPENDENT CLAIM (37 CFR

ADDITIONAL FEE ($)

1.16(j))

TOTAL ADD'L FEE

f-Z

RATE ($)

ADDITIONAL FEE ($)

TOTAL ADD'L FEE

RATE ($)

X $

ADDITIONAL FEE ($)

1.16(j))

TOTAL ADD'L FEE

* If the entry in column

1 is less than the entry in column 2, write "0" in column 3.

.. If the "Highest Number Previously Paid For" IN THIS SPACE is less than 20, enter "20".

TOTAL ADD'L FEE

Legal Instrument Examiner: !DANTE SMITH/

... If the "Highest Number Previously Paid For" IN THIS SPACE is less than 3, enter "3". The "Highest Number Previously Paid For" (Total or Independent) is the highest number found in the appropriate box in column 1. This collection of Information IS required by 37 CFR 1.16. The Information IS required to obtain or retain a benefit by the public which IS to file (and by the USPTO to process) an application. Confidentiality is governed by 35 U.S.C. 122 and 37 CFR 1.14. This collection is estimated to take 12 minutes to complete, including gathering, preparing, and submitting the completed application form to the USPTO. Time will vary depending upon the individual case. Any comments on the amount of time you require to complete this form and/or suggestions for reducing this burden, should be sent to the Chief Information Officer, U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, U.S. Department of Commerce, P.O. Box 1450, Alexandria, VA 22313-1450. DO NOT SEND FEES OR COMPLETED FORMS TO THIS ADDRESS. SEND TO: Commissioner for Patents, P.O. Box 1450, Alexandria, VA 22313-1450. If you need assistance in completing the form, cal/l-800-PTO-9199 and select option 2.

APPLICATION NO.

FILING DATE

FIRST NAMED INVENTOR

ATTORNEY DOCKET NO.

CONFIRMATION NO.

121208,902

09/1112008

Puneet K. Gupta

15000

3415

24739

7590

05/27/2011

CENTRAL COAST PATENT AGENCY, INC 3 HANGAR WAY SUITE D WATSONVILLE, CA 95076

EXAMINER THATCHER, PAUL ART UNIT

PAPER NUMBER

2172

NOTIFICATION DATE

DELIVERY MODE

05/27/2011

ELECTRONIC

PTOL-90A (Rev. 04/07)

Application No.

Applicant(s) GUPTA, PUNEET K.

12/208,902

Office Action Summary

Examiner

Art Unit

PAUL THATCHER

2172

-- The MAILING DA TE of this communication appears on the cover sheet with the correspondence address --

Period for Reply

A SHORTENED STATUTORY PERIOD FOR REPLY IS SET TO EXPIRE;2 MONTH(S) OR THIRTY (30) DAYS, WHICHEVER IS LONGER, FROM THE MAILING DATE OF THIS COMMUNICATION. Extensions of time may be available under the provisions of 37 CFR t. t 36(a). In no event, however, maya reply be timely filed after SIX (6) MONTHS from the mailing date of this communication. If NO period for reply is specified above, the maximum statutory period will apply and will expire SIX (6) MONTHS from the mailing date of this communication. Failure to reply within the set or extended period for reply will, by statute, cause the application to become ABANDONED (35 U.S.C. § t 33). Any reply received by the Office later than three months after the mailing date of this communication, even if timely filed, may reduce any earned patent term adjustment. See 37 CFR t .704(b).

Status

1)iZI Responsive to communication(s) filed on 11 September 2008. 2a)0 This action is FINAL.

2b)iZI This action is non-final.

3)0 Since this application is in condition for allowance except for formal matters, prosecution as to the merits is closed in accordance with the practice under Ex parte Quayle, 1935 C.D. 11,453 O.G. 213. Disposition of Claims

4)iZI Claim(s) 1-18 is/are pending in the application. 4a) Of the above claim(s) _ _ is/are withdrawn from consideration. 5)0 Claim(s) _ _ is/are allowed. 6)iZI Claim(s) 1-18 is/are rejected. 7)0 Claim(s) _ _ is/are objected to. 8)0 Claim(s) _ _ are subject to restriction and/or election requirement. Application Papers

9)0 The specification is objected to by the Examiner. 1O)iZI The drawing(s) filed on 19 December 2008 is/are: a)O accepted or b)iZI objected to by the Examiner. Applicant may not request that any objection to the drawing(s) be held in abeyance. See 37 CFR 1.85(a). Replacement drawing sheet(s) including the correction is required if the drawing(s) is objected to. See 37 CFR 1.121 (d).

11)0 The oath or declaration is objected to by the Exam iner. Note the attached Office Action or form PTO-152. Priority under 35 U.S.C. § 119

12)0 Acknowledgment is made of a claim for foreign priority under 35 U.S.C. § 119(a)-(d) or (f). a)O All

b)O Some * c)O None of:

1.0 Certified copies of the priority documents have been received. 2.0 Certified copies of the priority documents have been received in Application No. _ _ . 3.0 Copies of the certified copies of the priority documents have been received in this National Stage application from the International Bureau (PCT Rule 17.2(a)). * See the attached detailed Office action for a list of the certified copies not received.

Attachment{s) 1) 2) 3)

iZI

0 0

Notice of References Cited (PTO·892) Notice of Draftsperson's Patent Drawing Review (PTO·948) Information Disclosure Statement(s) (PTO/S8/08) Paper No(s)/Mail Date _ _ .

0 5) 0 6) 0 4)

Interview Summary (PTO·413) Paper No(s)/Mail Date. _ _ . Notice of Informal Patent Application Other: _ _ .

U.s. Patent and Trademark Office

PTOL·326 (Rev. 08·06)

Office Action Summary

Part of Paper No.lMail Date 20110516

Application/Control Number: 12/208,902

Page 2

Art Unit: 2172 DETAILED ACTION

Drawings The drawings were received on 12/29/2008. According to the Specification the

invention is entitled "SYSTEM FOR CREATING ASSOCIATIONS BElWEEN ELEMENTS OF A MESSAGE APPLICATION" and these drawings are supposed to be for email interface application and a calendar interface. The note accompanying the drawings state they are replacements for "DRILLING RISER AUXILIARY CLAMP WITH INTEGRAL MUX CLAMP", and while the application number 12/208,902 does match this application the title and subject matter do not. The Examiner believes these drawing are intended for another application and that the Applicant intended to keep the original Figures 6 and 7. Claim Rejections - 35 USC ยง 101

35 U.S.C. 101 reads as follows: Whoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent therefor, subject to the conditions and requirements of this title.

Claims 1-10 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 101 because the claimed invention is

directed to non-statutory subject matter. Regarding Claim 1, Claim 1 does not necessarily recite any hardware. The

claim appears to be defining software. Software per se is not statutory subject matter and therefore is not patentable. See In re Bilski. While the claim recites "digital media", "computer system", and "computing appliance" it does so in a way that does not require any of these elements. In reference to computer readable media and by relation digital media questions also arise regarding whether such media includes signals per se which

Application/Control Number: 12/208,902

Page 3

Art Unit: 2172 are also unpatentable as nonstatutory subject matter. See In re Nuijten. While the claim recites "a user interface ", "a list of contacts", and "a calendar" these components can all be rendered as pure software. The Claim does not appear to be a method claim or a composition of matter claim. The Claim specifies no hardware. So the claim does not qualify as a apparatus or article of manufacture. Since in this case no elements of physical structure are listed, the recited invention is computer software per se and is not a "process," a "machine," a "manufacture," or a "composition of matter," as defined in 35 U.S.C. 101. Thus, Claim 1 fails to recite statutory subject matter. Dependant claims may be patentable if they include sufficient structure to bring it within a statutory class. The applicant may overcome this rejection by amending the claim to read "a user interface executing from instructions stored on a non-transitory digital media". Regarding Claims 2-4, Claim 2-4 recite "the computing system is a memory drive integral to the computing appliance", " the computing system is a server", and "the data network is the Internet network". As discussed earlier the computer system and computing appliance of Claim 1 are recited as optional features. The recitation of a optional elements are not sufficient to make these claims patentable subject matter. Additionally, "a server" is broad enough to include pure software. Therefore it is not sufficient to make this claim patentable subject matter. Regarding Claims 5-6, Claims 5-6 do not necessarily add any physically elements. Therefore these additions are not sufficient to make these claims patentable subject matter.

Application/Control Number: 12/208,902

Page 4

Art Unit: 2172

Regarding Claim 7, has similar deficiencies as Claim 1 and is rejected under similar analysis. A "system" can be interpreted broadly enough to include pure software.

Regarding Claims 8 and 9, Claims 8-9 are similar to Claims 2-3 and are rejected under a similar analysis.

Regarding Claim 10, Claim 10 does not necessarily add any physically elements. Therefore these additions are not sufficient to make this claim patentable subject matter.

Claim Rejections - 35 USC ยง 102 (a) the invention was known or used by others in this country, or patented or described in a printed publication in this or a foreign country, before the invention thereof by the applicant for a patent.

Claims 1, 3, 4,17, and 18 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 102(a) as being

anticipated by "Gmail Help Center", archived various dates in 2007, downloaded May 16-17,2011 from the Internet WaybackMachine, http://replay.web.arctlive.org!20070608080225/http:/!mail.qoogle.com/supporl!?ctx:::abo ut (Gmail).

With respect to Claim 1, Gmail teaches "A messaging application comprising: a user interface executable from a digital media on a computing system onboard or accessible to a computing appliance," (Gmail is a webmail service. See Page 1). Gmail teaches "the user interface enabling display and access to one or more message folders, a list of contacts, a calendar," (Access to inbox and spam folders. See Page 5. Display and access to a contact list. See Page 17. Adding calendar items See Page 13). Gmail teaches "a message generation template;" (An email message form serves

Application/Control Number: 12/208,902

Page 5

Art Unit: 2172 as a template allowing the user to add to, cc, bcc, subjects, and the body of a message. Gmail provides a form to facilitate sending an email message. See Page 20. Signature lines can be automatically added to the end of a message. See Page 14). Gmail teaches "and a word tagging utility installed to and executable from the digital media and made accessible through the user interface; characterized in that the word tagging utility is operable to tag functional elements of the message application to create associations between the tagged elements, the associations recognized by the messaging application in the performance of tasks involving the elements" (Gmail allows users to label messages. See Page 8-9. Clicking on a label name on the left side of the page will show all messages with that label. See Page 8). With respect to Claim 3, Gmail teaches "wherein the user interface is an email

interface and the computing system is a server with a digital medium accessible to the computing appliance over a data network." (Gmail is a webmail service. See Page 1. Email and chat from the same web browser wherever you have access to the Internet. See Page 2). With respect to Claim 4, Gmail teaches "the data network is the Intemet

network." (Email and chat from the same web browser wherever you have access to the Internet. See Page 2). With respect to Claim 17, Gmail teaches "A method for routing electronic

messages comprising the steps: (a) using a tagging utility, tagging one or more existing or created message folders" (Gmail allows users to create labels. See Page 8. Labels are like folders but with extra features. See Page 8. Messages can be labeled (i.e.

Application/Control Number: 12/208,902

Page 6

Art Unit: 2172 tagged), which will cause the tagged message to appear in a view will all other similarly tagged messages when the tag is clicked on from the left side of the screen. See Page 8.) Gmail teaches "defining associations between messaging contacts of a contact list and the message folders; (b) receiving an electronic message from one or more of the contacts the message including a subject line and a from identity; and (c) routing the electronic message to the one or more message folders based on parsing the subject line of the message and matching that to the tags for one or more message folders" (Gmail allows users to set up filters to automatically label mail based on senders, keywords, and more. See Page 10. Filter options include subject criteria. See Page 22. Messages that are labeled will show up when ever the label is clicked on the left hand side of the screen. See Page 8.)

With respect to Claim 18, Gmail teaches "in step (b) one or more parts of the identity of the message originator are used to define the association to an existing or created folder also tagged with one or more parts of the identity"

Claim Rejections - 35 USC ยง 103 4.

The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 103(a) which forms the basis for all

Claims 6 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103(b) as being unpatentable over "Gmail

Help Center", archived various dates in 2007, downloaded May 16-17,2011 from the

Application/Control Number: 12/208,902

Page 7

Art Unit: 2172 Internet WaybackMachine, http://replay.web.archive.orgi20070608080225!http:limail.google.com/supportl?ctx:::abo ut (Gmail) in light of U.S. Patent Application Publication 2007/0244892 to Narancic (Narancic). Regarding Claim 6, Gmail doesn't appear to teach labeling appointments and related pending tasks. Narancic teach "the functional elements subject to tagging further include scheduled appointments and related tasks pending". ("The matter tags and generated e-mail addresses are used to associate items (e.g., e-mails, calendars, notes, tasks, reminders, documents, and others) with a given matter". See Narancic, Paragraph 35). It would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art at the time of the invention to combing the teaching of Gmail and Narancic, because projects may involve items of different types that would be more easily handled if there was a way to keep items associated together. See Narancic Paragraph 3,4, and 25.

Claims 2, 5, and 7-16 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103(b) as being

unpatentable over "Gmail Help Center", archived various dates in 2007, downloaded May 16-17,2011 from the Internet WaybackMachine, http://replay.web.archive.org/20070608080225/http://mail.google.com/support!?ctx:=abo ut (Gmail) in light of U.S. Patent Application Publication 2007/02900787 to Fiatal et al (Fiatal).

Application/Control Number: 12/208,902

Page 8

Art Unit: 2172 With respect to Claim 2, Gmail teaches "wherein the user interface is an email

include at least message folders" (Labels do all the work of folders. See Gmail, Page 8. To view all the messages with a particular label, click on that label along the left side of any Gmail page). Gmail doesn't appear to teach the tagging of contacts. Fiatal teaches the tagging of contacts. (See Fiatal, Paragraph 30). It would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art at the time of the invention to combine the teaching of Gmail and Fiatal because Fiatal teaches extending the Gmail service with its invention. See Fiatal, Paragraph 40. Regarding Claim 7, Claim 7 is similar in scope as Claim 1 and is rejected under

similar analysis with the possible exception of the limitation "a database for storing tag words and for mapping associations between tagged elements".

Application/Control Number: 12/208,902

Page 9

Art Unit: 2172 Gmail teaches "mapping associations between tagged elements" (Gmail allows users to label messages. See Page 8-9. Clicking on a label name on the left side of the page will show all messages with that label. See Page 8). Gmail doesn't explicitly teach database for storing tagged words. Fiatal teaches "a database for storing tag words" (Contact database sorted by tag. See Fiatal, Paragraph 45). It would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art at the time of the invention to combine the teaching of Gmail and Fiatal because Fiatal teaches extending the Gmail service with its invention. See Fiatal, Paragraph 40.

Regarding Claim 8, Claim 8 is the same in scope as Claim 2 and is rejected under the same analysis.

Regarding Claim 9, Claim 9 is the same in scope as Claim 3 and is rejected under the same analysis.

Regarding Claim 10, Gmail, as modified by Fiatal, teaches "one of the specific tasks is routing email messages based on tag associations between from identities and message folders. (Gmail allows users to label messages. See Page 8-9. Clicking on a label name on the left side of the page will show all messages with that label. See Page 8).

Regarding Claim 11, Gmail doesn't clearly teach the tagging of contacts. Fiatal teaches "(a) using a tagging utility, tagging one or more individual contacts with one or more tags;" (See Fiatal, Paragraph 30). It would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art at the time of the invention to combine the teaching of Gmail and Fiatal to allow users to label or tag contacts in a similar manner as users can label or

Application/Control Number: 12/208,902

Page 10

Art Unit: 2172 tag message, because Fiatal teaches extending the Gmail service with its invention. See Fiatal, Paragraph 40. Gmail, as modified by Fiatal, teaches "A method for routing electronic messages comprising the steps: ... (b) tagging one or more existing or created message folders based in part on the tagging operation of step (a) defining associations between the contacts of step (a) and the message folders by one or more common tags;" (Labels do all the things that folders do but more. See Gmail, Page 8. Creating a label automatically associates the message with the folder like functionality of the label. See Gmail, Page 8). Gmail, as modified by Fiatal, teaches "(c) receiving an electronic message from one or more of the contacts the message including a subject line and a from identity;" (Gmail can receive emails. See Gmail Page 2. These messages may be from contacts that have been tagged. Emails may have included a subject line). Gmail, as modified by Fiatal, teaches "(d) routing the electronic message to the one or more message folders based on the associations defined by the tagging operation." (Gmail allows users to label messages. See Page 8-9. Clicking on a label name on the left side of the page will show all messages with that label. See Page 8. If the message is from a tagged/labeled contact as described in Fiatal then the message would automatically appear in the label view.). With respect to Claim 12, Gmail, as modified by Fiatal, teaches "wherein the

messages are email messages" (Gmail is an email and instant messaging service. See Gmail, Page 1). Gmail, as modified by Fiatal, teaches "the message sorting is

Application/Control Number: 12/208,902

Page 11

Art Unit: 2172 performed by an email application" (messages are organized into conversations. See Page 21). With respect to Claim 13, Gmail, as modified by Fiatal, teaches "wherein in step

(a) the tagging utility is executable through a control on a toolbar of a messaging application interface" (Gmail teaches the label or tagging of messages through use of a combo box at the top of the interface. See Gmail, Pages 8, 5, and 6. In light of the modification of Fiatal in adding the tagging of contacts as well, it would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art at the time of the invention to also make the tagging of contacts through a similar interface because such similarities make a product more intuitive for users to use.) With respect to Claim 14, Gmail, as modified by Fiatal, teaches "wherein at

step (d) the routing is performed after the message is read by a user, the final destination for routing dependent upon user acceptance or rejection of a folder recommendation" (Gmail allow users to edit labels on messages. See Gmail, Pages 8, 9, and 23. This editing includes adding new labels and deleting old ones. See 10. This can be done before during or after reading the message. Since the folder/label that the message will end up in depends on what the user ultimately decides (See Gmail Page 8), and since the message may have initially been label because of a contact. All elements of this claim are met.) With respect to Claim 15 Gmail teaches "wherein in step (d) the routing is

performed immediately after a message has arrived and before it is accessed by a user." (As discussed in Claim 11, Clicking on a label name on the left side of the page

Application/Control Number: 12/208,902

Page 12

Art Unit: 2172 will show all messages with that label. See Page 8. If the message is from a tagged/labeled contact as described in Fiatal then the message would automatically appear in the label view. Additionally, Users can create filters to label messages in their account based on sender, recipients, and more and set such filters to work automatically. See Gmail, Page 10) With respect to Claim 16, Gmail, as modified by Fiatal, teaches "steps (a) and (b) are performed automatically a first time by crawling through a personal folder containing one or more folders and a list of contacts" (Users can create filters to label messages in their account based on sender, recipients, and more. See Gmail, Page 10).

Conclusion 7.

The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to

Application/Control Number: 12/208,902

Page 13

Art Unit: 2172 Information regarding the status of an application may be obtained from the Patent Application Information Retrieval (PAIR) system. Status information for published applications may be obtained from either Private PAIR or Public PAIR. Status information for unpublished applications is available through Private PAIR only. For more information about the PAIR system, see http://pair-direct.uspto.gov. Should you have questions on access to the Private PAIR system, contact the Electronic Business Center (EBC) at 866-217-9197 (toll-free). If you would like assistance from a USPTO Customer Service Representative or access to the automated information system, call 800-786-9199 (IN USA OR CANADA) or 571-272-1000.

/Boris Pesin/ Supervisory Patent Examiner, Art Unit 2172

Application/Control No.

Notice of References Cited

12/208,902

Applicant(s)/Patent Under Reexamination GUPTA, PUNEET K.

Examiner

Art Unit

PAUL THATCHER

2172

Page 1 of 1

U.S. PATENT DOCUMENTS

* * * * *

Document Number Country Code-Number-Kind Code

Date MM-YYYY

Name

Classification

US-2007/0290787 A 1

12-2007

Fiatal et al.

340/2.1

US-7,353,232 B1

04-2008

Kalucha et al.

705/64

US-2008/0140679 A 1

06-2008

Oeyo et al.

707/100

US-2007/0244892

10-2007

Narancic, Perry J.

707/007

US-

USFOREIGN PATENT DOCUMENTS

Document Number

Country Code-Number-Kind Code

Date MM-YYYY

Country

Name

Classification

N 0

P Q

R S

T NON-PATENT DOCUMENTS

Include as applicable: Author, Title Date, Publisher, Edition or Volume, Pertinent Pages)

"Gmail Help Center", archived various dates in 2007, downloaded May 16-17, 2011 from the Internet WaybackMachine, http://replay.web.archive.org/20070608080225/http://mail.google.com/supportl?ctx=about

"Fringe Contacts: People-Tagging for the Enterprise", Stephen Farrell and Tessa Lau, IBM Almaden Research Center, 2006

PTO-892 (Rev. 01-2001)

Notice of References Cited

Part of Paper No. 20110516

Search Notes

ApplicationlControl No.

Appl icant( s)/Patent Under Reexam ination

12208902

GUPTA, PUNEET K.

Examiner

Art Unit

PAUL THATCHER

2172

SEARCHED Class 715

I I 748 with key words

Subclass

I I

Date 5/13/2011

I Examiner I IPTI

SEARCH NOTES Search Notes

Date

East Search NPL Search

Examiner IPTI

5/13/2011 5/14/2011

INTERFERENCE SEARCH Class

I I

Subclass

I I

Date

Examiner

IIPAUL THATCHERI E,.mm".Art UM 2172

U.S. Patent and Trademark Office

Part of Paper No. : 20t t 05t 6

Index of Claims

= D

Application/Control No.

Appl icant( s )/Patent Under Reexam i nation

12208902

GUPTA, PUNEET K.

Examiner

Art Unit

PAUL THATCHER

2172

Rejected

Cancelled

Allowed

Restricted

Non-Elected

Appeal

Interference

Objected

D T.D.

Claims renumbered in the same order as presented by applicant

CLAIM Final

CPA

R.1.47

DATE

Original

05/19/2011

1 2 3 4

5 6 7 8

if if if

10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18

U.S. Patent and Trademark Office

if if

if if if if if

Part of Paper No. : 20t t 05t 6

Page 1 of 1

UNIIED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE

United States Patent and Trademark Office Address: COMMISSIONER FOR PATENTS P.o. Box 1450 Alexandria, Virginia 22313-1450 www.uspto.gov

BIB DATA SHEET CONFIRMATION NO. 3415 SERIAL NUMBER

12/208,902

FILING or 371 (c) DATE 09/11/2008

CLASS

GROUP ART UNIT

715

2172

ATTORNEY DOCKET NO. 15000

RULE APPLICANTS Puneet K. Gupta, Newark, CA;

** CONTINUING DATA ************************* ** FOREIGN APPLICATIONS ************************* ** IF REQUIRED, FOREIGN FILING LICENSE GRANTED ** ** SMALL ENTITY ** 09/22/2008 DYes

~No

35 USC t t 9(a-d) conditions met D Yes

~ No

Foreign Priority claimed

Verified and Acknowledged

Met after Allowance

IPAUL THATCHERI Examiner's Signature

Initials

STATE OR COUNTRY

SHEETS DRAWINGS

TOTAL CLAIMS

INDEPENDENT CLAIMS

ADDRESS

CENTRAL COAST PATENT AGENCY, INC 3 HANGAR WAY SUITE D WATSONVILLE, CA 95076 UNITED STATES TITLE

System for Creating Associations Between Elements of a Message Application

FILING FEE RECEIVED 540

BIB (Rev. 05/07).

FEES: Authority has been given in Paper No. to charge/credit DEPOSIT ACCOUNT No. for following:

All Fees

1.16 Fees (Filing)

1.17 Fees (Processing Ext. of time)

1.18 Fees (Issue)

Other

Credit

EAST Search History

EAST Search History EAST Search History (Prior Art)

IL4

122

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Fringe Contacts: People-Tagging for the Enterprise Stephen Farrell and Tessa Lau IBM Almaden Research Center 650 Harry Road San Jose, California +1 408-927 -{1856, 1901}

{sfarrell@almaden, tessalau@us}.ibm.com ABSTRACT

2.TAGGING PEOPLE

Tagging has arisen as way to enable users to contribute to a loose taxonomy characterizing web pages, pictures, products and other things. We propose tagging people in order to help individuals keep track of each other while contributing to a loose "Fringe characterization of their friends and colleagues. Contacts" is a reference system designed to test whether peopletagging is a viable and useful approach. It includes both user and programmatic interfaces to tagging functions. The latter is included to enable integration with other collaborative applications such as email or instant messaging. Some client plugins have been developed, and preliminary usage data are encouraging. We think that some characteristics of the enterprise -a clear notion of identity, "professional" environment, and existing need to classify people by their skills and projects-may be necessary ingredients for people-tagging to work.

Like many others, we have observed the trend toward applications that enable users, motivated by their own interests, to provide information that benefits a larger community. Del.icio.us, one such application, enables users to keep track of and share web pages while at the same time contributing to an emergent taxonomy (or "folksonomy" [I], [2]) that provides benefits even to users who never bookmark anything themselves. Our ongoing Fringe project has been exploring tools for people to fmd, leam about, and keep track of each other in enterprise environments in order to improve the effectiveness and reduce the cost of forming and maintaining professional relationships. We see some compelling parallels between social bookmarking and relationship management. Specifically, as with bookmarks, people presently keep track of colleagues using address books, buddy lists and other personal information management tools. Also, while the organization chart and employee directory provide key data about individuals, there is a persistent need to show more about people and how they are connected to others. Current efforts in enterprise directory development emphasize developing a fixed classification scheme [3], similar to the approach taken by web taxonomies such as Yahoo! Directory and DMoz. Our idea is that the same tagging mechanism and emergent "folksonomy" that works for bookmarking web pages can be adapted to work for bookmarking people in the enterprise, and that it will have the side-effect of providing rough descriptions of people's skills, roles, and projects in the form of a "tag cloud". Similarly, the frequency of a tag should say something of its strength, and so someone tagged with "java" 78 times is likely to know more (or, more accurately, to have a greater reputation for knowing more) than someone tagged 4 times with the same tag.

Categories and Subject Descriptors H.5.3 [Group Computing

and

Organization Interfaces]:

Collaborative

General Terms Design, Experimentation, Human Factors

Keywords Tagging, Social Networks, Relationship-Oriented Computing

1.INTRODUCTION Tagging has recently acquired popularity as a lightweight and flexible approach to classifying information. Tagging enables individuals to use whatever terms they think are appropriate to describe or help them recall a resource without the burden of selecting a category from a known taxonomy. It has been applied in a variety of applications ranging from desktop applications for organizing photos (F-Spot [5]) to web email systems (Gmail [6]). Tagging becomes most compelling when it is used in a collaborative environment, and tags from different people can be aggregated and combined. This approach has been used to manage bookmarks (Del.icio.us), images (Flickr) and products (Amazon.com). We want to know if this same approach can be used to characterize people, particularly in a large enterprise where maintaining and forming relationships are routine parts of the lives of thousands of people. This paper introduces the ideas and motivations behind people-tagging, describes our research implementation called "Fringe Contacts", and provides a preliminary discussion of the technical and social issues raised.

Tagging people is also a way to capture limited social-network data. One can see a little bit about who someone knows and who knows them and, more usefully, who the user and another individual have in common. Putting the descriptive and social network aspects together could yield even more compelling results. Seeing, for example, that someone has been tagged "ruby" by someone you know says that your colleague knows this person, that your colleague knows enough about "ruby" to make this judgment, that this person knows about "ruby", and that someone thinks they are knowledgeable about it. This tag enhances the reputation of the person who received this tag, particularly if they have received it from others as well. Moreover, the social context might reduce the ambiguity that would otherwise exist about whether this was "ruby" the programming language or "ruby" the mineral, etc. While there are precedents for people-tagging including Tagalag [4], we believe that the enterprise environment has some characteristics that make people-tagging more viable than on the Internet. For instance, the set of everyone in the organization is typically known, and each person has a unique identifier such as

an email address; the tagging system can thus be pre-populated with everyone in the organization, without people having to explicitly add new members. The existing employee directory can be mined for initial data such as real name, location, phone number, job title, and in many cases a picture. In our organization, intranet access is authenticated, so that intranet web sites such as Fringe Contacts can verify your identity without requiring you to create an account on the system and log in each time. This lack of anonymity and the professional context, in which people are accountable to their management, reduce the likelihood that users will abuse the system. (However, as discussed below, they do not preclude social issues from arising). Our goal of optimizing relationships also includes personal relationship-management enhancements, and we think that Fringe Contacts can provide some useful services toward that end. For instance, as a contact-list back end, it can unifY buddy lists and address books across applications. By tagging someone who you looked up in the enterprise directory, you can then send an instant message or email to the person by simply typing that tag (or just a part of their name) from your email or instant messaging client. Likewise, if you tag someone you received mail from, then look up their co-worker a week later, the enterprise directory can highlight this common connection. People can also use tags as lightweight mailing lists or groups. To support all of these functions, we envision a centralized address book service that interacts with plug-ins to existing productivity and collaboration applications.

direction of the edge also is linked to the authentication mechanism: users may only create and update tags on edges in which they are the user. It is possible to pivot on the user, target, or any of the tags. So, for example, one can efficiently retrieve everyone tagged by Randolf, everyone who has tagged Randolf with "colleague", every tag Randolf has used, and so on. The user and programming interfaces into the tagging system work by issuing these queries and formatting the results.

3.2 Web User Interface The web-based VI enables users to look up other employees, associate tags with them, and see what tags they have used and have been used to describe them. Any user can create tags and associate them with any other user. For example, one of the authors has tagged 143 people with 100 tags ranging from "fringe", the name of this project, to "jim", the nickname of a former boss. All tags are public, so anyone can see who he has tagged with each of these tags, and, given any person, what tags have been associated with him or her. Next to the profile of the person is a list of related people. This list is computed by fmding people with the most tags in common with the person currently being viewed. In contrast to tagging bookmarks and products, tags in Fringe Contacts can be reciprocated: the people a user tags may tag that user back. As a result, it is necessary to distinguish between "incoming" (left column) and "outgoing" (right colunm) tags for each person (see Figure 1). ~~~~'0..~~~'\1;~::;:;;;::::::::::::::::::J

Designing and developing Fringe Contacts had led us to consider some hypotheses testable by further research: 1.

Tagging is an effective way to organize contacts

"Social" tags can inform others about someone's interests, skills and expertise

People-tagging benefits from properties unique to the enterprise including a pre-populated directory

A tagging service can reduce the cost of relationship building and maintenance with an integrated experience across applications

3. IMPLEMENTATION In order to learn more about people-tagging, we created a web application with an HTML-based user interface and programming interfaces implemented as web services using the REST [7] design pattern. The user interface is not expected to be the primary way that people interact with tags, but is helpful as a reference and starting point. The web services enable developers to bring people-tagging into the context of other applications that people routinely use such as their web browser, calendar, email and messaging applications. Of course, data is shared between these systems and, in a sense, the web user interface is just another client of the underlying tag system.

3.1 Representation We model tags as properties of the directed edge that represents one half of a relationship between two people. So if Randolf tags James "manager", that suggests that James is "manager" to Randolf, but not vice-versa. James might choose to reciprocate this tag with "direct-report". Internally, the directed edges are represented as an ordered pair of people (the user and target), an id, and created, modified and accessed timestamps. Each edge can have one or more tags associated with it (setting the number of tags to zero removes the edge, a decision we may revisit). The

Figure 1. Fringe Contacts Web Vser Interface The tags used on and by a person are aggregated into "tag clouds". These collections of tags are sorted alphabetically, but typographically modulated based on the frequency of a tag: more frequently-used tags are displayed in a larger font. The clouds also serve as filters: clicking on one filters the list below to show only those people who have either used the tag on this person, or that the user has described with the tag. One can follow a second link to get a tag-centric view from which they can see everyone who has used the tag and everyone on whom the tag was used. In this view, the most frequently co-occurring tags are represented as another tag cloud. The web interface has two interactive features that make it easier to create tags and fmd people who have been assigned tags. The "tagger" widget, inspired by Amazon's tagging function, enables users to create multiple tags without a page refresh, and visually distinguishes them as formatted, comma-delimited text, not a web text input element (see Figure 2). The "search" widget is used to fmd people. If a single term is entered, it checks if that term is part of any name the user has already tagged, or is itself a tag. In either case, the results are brought up as a sorted list. If a name was matched, then the results are sorted by recency. If a tag is matched, then the people the user tagged with that tag

appear first, sorted by recency, followed by those others have tagged with that tag, sorted by the number of times that tag was used on them. If both a tag and name part are matched, the name matches appear first (see Figure 3).

tags -- shows tags one user has associated with another tagged -- all people tagged with a tag contacts -- all contacts of a person cloud -- all tags used by or on a person tag -- append, delete or set tags stats -- how frequently a tag has been used Each API that returns results allows the developer to specifY an offset and a limit, enabling navigation of large amounts of data.

Figure 2. Tagger widget, including auto-complete on tags

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3.3 REST API We believe that pervasiveness of tags is a prerequisite to Fringe Contacts being truly useful. Thus, in addition to the user interface described, Fringe Contacts also provides APIs that enable developers to provide a person-tagging capability in other applications. For example, if a user receives an instant message from an unknown colleague, and they chat for a few minutes about the Ruby programming language, then the user should be able to tag her colleague "ruby" so she will be able to fmd him in the future. We believe it is important that she be able to tag her colleague in context, ideally by tagging him directly from the chat application. Likewise, we hope to enable person tagging in any other context in which users encounter other people. Tags can also be used to identify ad hoc groups; for example, a user could send an instant message to everyone she has tagged with the term "lunch-gang", or filter her email inbox to only show messages from people tagged as "fringe". The API follows the REST style, and uses simply constructed GET URLs to fetch data, and POST requests to update or modify data. For example, to fmd all the the people one of the authors has tagged with "fringe": http://fr;ngecontacts.example . com/api / ? user=s far rell@almaden. ; bm. com&tags=f r; nge

likewise to fmd everyone who has tagged the author with "fringe": http://fr;ngecontacts.example . com/api / ? target=s far rell@almaden. ; bm. com&tags=f r; nge

The result of these requests is an XML document such as: <contacts target=" 5 far rell@almaden. ; bm. com" tags=" f r; nge" > <contact> <name>Jose Saramago</name> <email > j ose@example. ibm. com</email > <tags>research people fringe</tags> </contact>

3.4 Plugins & Integration Several extensions and plugins have already been developed These plugins include a using the Fringe Contacts API. bookmarklet to enable integration with other web pages, a nextgeneration employee directory, a Firefox plugin that discovers related information to person links, and a Gaim plugin to integrate with instant messaging. As critical plugins for other instant messaging and email applications have not been developed, we consider this experiment to be in the early stages.

3.4.1 Bookmarklet First, we provide a simple bookmarkld that detects all references to people in the current web page identified either by email address or by a link that includes their email address. Each reference to a person the user has tagged is highlighted with a yellow background, and hovering over the reference pops up a tooltip showing the tags the user has applied to this person. This bookmarklet enables users to quickly "mark up" a web page to It highlight all references to people in their social network. works by loading a secondary script parameterized using GET request by all of the person-identifiers found in the document. This secondary script is generated based on these parameters, and performs the calls to annotate the original web page. This bookmarklet is a proof-of-concept, and we plan an enhanced version of this bookmarklet that enables users to update their tags.

3.4.2 Fringe3 Directory Fringe3 is our latest revision of an advanced directory system. The tagging system integration is intended to help it to achieve the goals of showing more about people inside the organization and making it easier to keep track of colleagues (see Figure 4). Tagging is compelling in this environment, since it enables all users to contribute to the characterization and organization of any employee. Fringe3 communicates with the tagging service through a number of the APIs listed above. It queries for all of the tags one user has applied to another, and retrieves the tag "cloud" for each user. Moreover, it provides a view of everyone that the user has tagged, as well as views of everyone tagged by a certain tag. In addition, the auto-complete widget is exported into this interface, enabling rapid lookup of tagged people. One interesting function is that when an authenticated user accesses the directory, the names of everyone they have tagged are visually highlighted on directory pages. Thus, as they are browsing through the directory, they can quickly see who has been previously tagged. Lacking from the current implementation is an indication of who assigned each tag (hovering over a tag in the "cloud" shows only the frequency

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with which the tag was used), and a way to see who someone's contacts are. Stephe

of each individual in the list brings up a tooltip with details about the contact, including your tags for that person. We also provide the ability to search for and initiate conversations with people based on tags. We hope that providing the ability to tag people in context lowers the barrier to people-tagging, and results in increased usage of the system. Efforts are currently underway to port this functionality to other instant messaging clients in use within our organization.

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3.4.3 Tommy! Tommy! is a Firefox extension created by a colleague of ours for internal IBM use. It works by augmenting the right-click menu for web links by checking for person-identifiers and, when present, providing a wide variety of data about that person gathered from internal databases. The author has extended Tommy! to support Fringe Contacts and, indeed, helped develop our API. It enables users to see and update their tags, as well as see who has tagged someone, and who that person has tagged (see Figure 5).

Figure 6. Fringe Contacts integrated into Gaim instant messenger client

Helder Luz

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3.4.4 Integration with instant messaging We have developed a plugin for the Gaim instant messaging application that enables users to tag others, and view their tags, from within the context of a chat conversation (Figure 6). When a new conversation window is opened, the system displays the tags you have applied to your buddy, and the tags he/she has applied to you. During the conversation, the plugin provides commands to add a tag to the person, delete a tag, replace the set of tags with a new set, and display the person's tag cloud (list of all tags applied to this person by anyone, ordered by frequency). Changing someone's tags results in a message being generated in the chat conversation visible to both partners; this practice encourages Fringe Contacts users to spread awareness of peopletagging. The plugin also provides a tag-based buddylist. The system retrieves the set of people the user has tagged, and displays them as a dynamically-generated buddy list. Hovering over the name

Our first hypotheses is that tagging is an effective way to keep track of and manage contacts. Although Fringe Contacts has only been deployed within our organization for approximately four months and no plug-ins have been written for the most widely-used collaborative applications - email and instant messaging - we have observed that some early adopters have started to use it. 304 people have created tags, entering a total of 1387 tags comprising 2937 person-person edges. The most popular tags were those generated by important "buddy lists" from instant messenger clients. The most popular tags (and frequency) include "blogger" (312), "sametime" (123) and "research" (89). Many of those tags were automatically applied when people imported their 1M buddylists into Fringe Contacts. Other popular tags include "academy" (68), "cio" (63), "collaboration" (53) and "km" (46). Collaboration and km (knowledge management) refer to the interests of people using the tagging system, while academy and cio refer to membership in various IBM organizations. Tags such as "architect" (42), "design" (33), "de" (26, an IBM Distinguished Engineer) and "inventor" (15) speak more about the skills of individuals. Clearly more data will be required for a proper analysis. Future research will go into understanding how effectively people can use tags as a way to keep track of their colleagues and how much efficiency they gain from that endeavor. We cannot say much about these yet, but we have received some favorable comments from supporters and early-adopters including, "I think this level of interactivity is going to get people to tag each other with wild abandon and should revolutionize our view of social

software within IBM", and " ... this is an awesome glimpse of the future." 4.1.2 Tags inform about social network and expertise Our second hypothesis is that tagging can provide information about individuals and their relationships to others inside the organization. In particular, we think that the tag cloud can provide information about someone's skills and interests, and that the people most associated with tags are somehow "important" relative to that tag. For example, the tags assigned to Helder (see Figure 5) indicate "blogger" and "tommy" are the most important terms characterizing him, and the others fill out some details including his location ("australia"), and some technologies related to Tommy! including "mozilla", "firefox", "javascript" and "xul". Helder is well known in the internal blogging community for his blog and for developing Tommy!, so these tags are appropriate. It should be noted, however, that they reflect his reputation among the early adopters of Fringe Contacts, and in fact say little about his primary job responsibilities. It is not surprising that looking at the tag "tommy" would show that Helder is the most important person relative to that topic, or that he is one of the most important people relative to the tag "blogger". What is surprising is that this information emerged as a result of voluntary action taken by people across the organization without any coordination.

There are also some potential problems with people-tagging that appear to stem from their very nature. Some users have expressed misgivings about others being able to type something that appears on their profile. In fact, we have had one incident so far that was relayed to the authors. This incident involved three people: Alice, Bob and Chuck (not original names). Alice knows Bob and Chuck well, but Bob and Chuck are newly acquainted. Bob used a few tags including "self-involved" to characterize Chuck. Chuck, not surprisingly, was a little put off and asked Alice if she knew why Bob had done this. Alice said she did not, but contacted Bob on the side. Bob's response made it clear that he was joking and, upon finding that it bothered Chuck, immediately removed the tag. This example is interesting because it illustrates, on the one hand, a big concern of tagging people-that they may not be pleased with the tags that others assign to them-and, on the other hand, how the openness (and lack of anonymity) of the system enabled social forces to be employed to correct the situation. It is suggestive, however, of bigger problems that might arise. For example, what if Bob had been unwilling to remove this tag? Or, what if Chuck had been too timid to approach Alice, or Alice unwilling to approach Bob? How these problems do or do not resolve themselves will be interesting to observe in the future. Users have also been concerned about the permanence of tags. For example, what if many people have tagged them with the name of one project or team, and they move on to another. Should there be a mechanism by which tags decay over time? Will social forces be enough to correct these inaccuracies, or should a user be able to remove tags that others have assigned to them?

referred to in the previous section depended on authenticated users who know each other and operate within a community. We have not tested whether these constraints are necessary or coincidental. Some possible areas of future research might be to try to enable person-tagging on the Internet in a way that leverages reputation to weight tags differently. Alternatively, we could see how enabling people to post tags anonymously would affect the social dynamics inside the enterprise.

4.1.4 Pervasive Tagging The motivation for the tagging-as-service implementation is to enable people-tagging to be integrated into many existing applications with minimal effort. We think the few plugins developed already suggest that this approach is viable. It is not until users can tag others from any electronic context in which they encounter people (email, instant messaging, web browsing, teamrooms, etc.) that we will see how this impacts user behavior. Another direction for future work is to compare people-tagging against existing collaborative tagging practice, such as social bookmarking or photo tagging. Do people use the same tags to describe other people as they do web pages or photographs? Does the fact that tagging can be reciprocated (I tag you, you tag me) lead to different tagging behavior? In conclusion, we believe that people-tagging in an enterprise can provide many benefits, such as helping people maintain professional relationships, improving expertise location, and explicitly capturing the social network already present in an organization. However, our experience has shown that there are potential pitfalls in introducing this functionality into an enterprise. Thus our research goal is to investigate the challenges, both technological and social, of bringing peopletagging to the enterprise, and helping people maintain their professional relationships more effectively.

5. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Helder Luz created the Tommy! plugin and helped debug the Fringe Contacts API. Eric Wilcox designed the interface for Fringe3 which integrated a tagging widget and inspired this project. Jon Feinberg's work on Dogear set the standard for lightweight, REST-based tagging services deployed within our organization (IBM).

6. REFERENCES [1] Shirky, C. "Folksonomy" (August 2004), http://www.corante.comimany/archives/2004/08/25/folksonomy.p hp [2] Vanderwal, T. (2005). "Off the top: Folksonomy Entries", http://www.vanderwal.net/randomicategory.php?cat= 153 Visited January 28, 2006 [3] Voelker, M. "Optimizing the Human Supply Chain" (January 2006), http://www.intelligententerprise.comiprint_ article.jhtml ?articleID =175002433

4.1.3 Tagging Benefits from Enterprise Environment

[4] "Tagalag: Manage your identity". http://www.tagalag.com/

The enterprise environment provides comprehensive employee records, places constraints on who can use the tagging system, and the professional environment and lack of anonymity restrains behavior. In fact, the resolutions to both of the social problems

[5] F-Spot. http://www.gnome.org/projects/f-spot/ [6] GMail. http://www.gmail.com [7] Fielding, R. (2000) "REST - Representational State Transfer". http://www.ics.uci.edU/~fielding/pubs/dissertationitop.htm

About Gmail

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Gmail is Google's free webmail service. It comes with built-in Google search technology and over 2,600 megabytes of storage (and growing every day). You can keep all your important messages, files and pictures forever, use search to quickly and easily find anything you're looking for, and make sense of it all with a new way of viewing messages as part of conversations. There are no pop-ups or untargeted banner ads in Gmail, only small text ads. Ads and related information are relevant to your messages, so instead of being obtrusive, they may even be useful for once. Gmail also integrates instant messaging right into the email experience, so you can stay in even better touch with your friends when you're online. Easy, efficient and maybe even fun to use. It's a whole new way to think about email. It's Google's approach to email.

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Facts

• Cost: Free • Storage: 2,600+ megabytes (and counting) • Superior spam protection using innovative Google technology • Languages: Messages can be sent and read in most languages. The Gmail interface is available in 40 languages: US and UK English, simplified and traditional Chinese, Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Sloven ian, Spanish, Swedish, Tagalog, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese.

• JavaScript and cookies must be enabled on all browsers • Fully supported browsers: - Microsoft IE 5.5+ (download: Windows) - Netscape 7.1 + (download: Windows Mac Linux) - Mozilla 1.4+ (download: Windows Mac Linux) - Mozilla Firefox 0.8+ (download: Windows Ms._Q t[m,1?;) - Safari 1.2.1 + (download: Mac) • Many other browsers work with Gmail's basic HTML view, including: - Microsoft IE 4.0+ - Netscape 4.07+ - Opera 6.03+ • Chats in Gmail work on Microsoft IE 6.0+ and Firefox 1.0+

• Access: Free automatic forwarding and POP3 access

Screenshots

Inbox Features

Conversation View

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5117/2011

About Gmail

Page 2 of 3

Advanced Search

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Why should I sign uo for Gmail? What makes it different? How do I sign uQ? What about spam? I heard I can chat in Gmail too? Can I get Gmail on mv ohone? What does Gmail do to prevent viruses? Are there ads in Gmail? What about privacy? Why is Google offering.. email and instant messaaing? I thought

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1. What makes Gmail different? Yes, Gmail is another email service. But it's different in lots of ways, starting with a philosophy: that communications can be made simpler, more efficient and more fun. When building Gmail, we looked at the frustrations people were having with email, and started with our product from scratch. The result is something that's faster, cleaner, and more intuitive. For example, Gmail automatically groups an email and its replies into a conversation, so you can easily follow the back and forth of an email exchange. It's just like you were chatting. And now, you can chat in Gmail too. There are no pop-ups or banner ads in Gmail, and very little spam. With Google search, it's easier for you to find the things that matter to you. And Gmail even has some personality. But don't take our word for it, try it yourself. Think of it as a fresh start. 2. How do I sign up? You can get a Gmail account if you're invited by someone who already has one. Or, you can sign uQ for an account using your mobile phone. 3. What about spam? Innovative Google technology on the inside keeps spam messages on the outside. Lack of spam is one of our users' number one reasons for loving Gmail. And we keep improving our sophisticated spam filter every day. You can help by using the Report Spam button, which removes spam from your inbox and automatically improves spam filtering in the future. 4. I heard I can chat in Gmail too? Yes, you can! Why should you always have to choose whether you want to email or chat with someone, and then go to a different program for each? Gmail integrates the two so you can see when your friends are online and get in touch with them however you want. Having email and chat in the same web browser means you can now chat with your friends wherever you have Internet access. Even save and search for your chat histories just as you would with email messages so you never lose important information again. Gmail users are now part of the Google Talk network, and this feature is completely synchronized with our downloadable Google Taik cilent, which also enables free voice calls through your computer. 5. Can I get Gmail on my phone? There are two ways you can access Gmail on your phone. You can download the Gmail for mobile devices application, by pointing your phone's web browser to http://gmail.com/app or you can access Gmail directly over the web, by pointing your phone's web browser to httQ:/lgmaiLcom. If your phone

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5117/2011

About Gmail

Page 3 of 3 supports it, we recommend the downloadable application-it's super-fast. You have no idea how fast email on your phone can be! Both mobile versions are optimized for the phone you're using, make it easy for you to view the attachments you receive in email messages, and keep your Gmail account synchronized whether you're accessing it from your phone or on your computer. 6. What does Gmail do to prevent viruses? We take the security of our users very seriously. In addition to virus protection that automatically scans your attachments and tries to remove any viruses found in them, Gmail also doesn't send or receive any executable files since most computer viruses are contained in executable files. 7. Are there ads in Gmail? Yes, there are small, unobtrusive, and relevant text ads alongside your Gmail messages, similar to those on the side of Google search results pages. The matching of ads to content is a completely automated process performed by computers. No humans read your email to target the ads, and no email content or other personally identifiable information is ever provided to advertisers. Ads are never inserted into the body text of either incoming or outgoing Gmail messages and you won't see any pop-ups or untargeted banner ads in Gmail. In fact, Gmail users have even told us that they've found our ads to be interesting and even useful. 8. What about privacy? Google respects our users' privacy. For details, please see the Gmail Privacy Policy. Google also take several steps to guard the confidentiality of users' information by offering a number of industry-leading protections. To learn more, please visit our section on Gmaii and privacv. 9. Why is Google offering email and instant messaging? I thought you were a search company. Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally useful and accessible. We know that more and more of the information that's important to people is being exchanged and kept in email and chats. It can be overwhelming to keep track of this information, or to find later. We believe we can help with that. Gmail helps users make sense of the information in their inboxes. There is less spam, things are easier to find, and you can keep the things that are important to you. Google's search technology is at the core of all of this. And now, we're using that technology to do for email what we did for search. Making it easier and more efficient than ever. (( . ;2()C? Gooqie· Gmail Home· Privacy Policy·

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Gmai1: Help Center

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Why doesn't my label instantly appear in my Labels box? Why does a label I deleted still show up on messages? I can't rename a label.

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5/16/2011

Gmail: Help Center - How do I use labels?

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Labels do all the work of folders and give you an extra bonus: you can add more than one to a conversation. Once you've created a label, you can view all the messages with that label by searching, or by clicking the SWilchina to Gmail _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _~Iabel name along the left side of any Gmail page. Take the Gmail Tour

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Select the message(s) you'd like to label by checking the box(es) next to the sender's name. Select New label from the More Actions ... drop·down menu. Enter the name of the new label in the text box, and click OK.

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The selected messages will automatically be categorized under the new label. To edit a label: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Log in to your Gmail account. Click Edit labels at the bottom of the Labels box. Click rename next to the label you want to edit. Enter the new label name, and click OK.

All the messages categorized under your old label name will now be categorized under your new label. To delete a label: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Log in to your Gmail account. Click Edit labels at the bottom of the Labels box. Click remove label next to the label you want to delete. Confirm that you'd like to remove the label by clicking OK.

* Removing a label doesn't delete the messages previously categorized with that label.

After labeling a message or conversation, you can remove it from your inbox by archiving it. Then, you can view archived messages by clicking All Mail, or by clicking the label name along the left side of any Gmail page. Learn the basics of using labels to better organize your mail. View a brief demo (requires Macromedia® Flash).

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Gmail: Help Center - How do I label my mail?

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Check the box next to the message you'd like to label. (You can label more than one message at a time.) From the More actions ... drop-down menu, select the label you'd like to apply.

If you incorrectly label a message, click Undo in the yellow bar along the top of the page to remove the label. (The Undo link is only available immediately after applying the labeL)

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5/16/2011

Gmail: Help Center - How do I set up filters?

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Gmail's filters allow you to manage the flow of incoming messages. Using filters, you can automatically labe!, archive, delete, star, or forward your mail, based on any combination of keywords, sender, recipients, and more.

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To create a filter: 1. 2. 3.

Click Create a filter (next to the Search the Web button at the top of any Gmail page). Enter your filter criteria in the appropriate field(s). Click Test Search to see which messages currently in your account match your filter terms. You can update your criteria and run another test search, or click Next Step. Select one or more actions from the list. These actions will be applied to messages matching your filter criteria in the order in which the actions are listed -- for example, you could choose to Forward matching messages to a specific email address, then Delete the messages. If you'd like to apply this filter to messages already in your account, select the Also apply filter to x conversations below checkbox. Click Create Filter.

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To edit or delete existing filters: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Click Settings (at the top-right of any Gmail page). Click Filters. Find the filter you'd like to change and click its edit link, or click delete to remove the filter. If you're editing the filter, enter the updated criteria for the filter in the appropriate fields, and click Next Step. Update any actions and click Update Filter.

Learn the basics of using filters to better organize your mail. View a brief demo (requires Macromedia Flash.A.®).

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5/17/2011

Gmail: Help Center - My messages skip the inbox

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If your incoming messages are skipping your Inbox, the cause is a misconfigured filter, or a setting on your Forwarding and POP tab.

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To resolve this issue, please make sure you haven't created any filters with the actions Skip the Inbox (Archive it) or Delete it that would affect the messages in question. If you have many filters or have complicated filters in place, you may need to edit the Skip the Inbox (Archive it) or Delete it action to guarantee that they are not at fault.

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If you've enabled forwarding in your account, please ensure that you have not selected archive Gmail's copy or delete Gmail's copy in your forwarding options. If you're using a POP client to access Gmail, please ensure that you have not selected archive Gmail's copy or delete Gmail's copy in step 2 of your POP download options. Finally, if you're accessing your Gmail from multiple POP clients (with recent mode), please verify that you have selected 'Leave a copy of messages on server' in your client configuration settings.

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5/17/2011

I see an "Add to calendar" link in Gmail. What is this?

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Google makes it easy for you to keep track of your schedule. Just like we do with addresses and package tracking numbers, Gmail displays an "Add to calendar" link when you open a message that contains event information. This way, you can easily add the event to your Google Calendar.

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SYSTEM FOR CREATING ASSOCIATIONS BETWEEN ELEMENTS OF A MESSAGE APPLICATION

CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS NA

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION 10 1. Field of the invention: The present invention is in the field of network communications, particularly electronic messaging systems, and pertains in some aspects to enhanced application interfaces for interacting within a messaging system using created associations between 15

specific message application elements.

2. Discussion of the state of the art: Electronic messaging is well known in the art and there are many messaging programs available for sending and receiving electronic messages such as email, for 20

example, over a data network. Email messages are a good example of asynchronous electronic messaging although there are other kinds of messaging systems such as instant messaging (IM), simple message service (SMS), media message service (MMS), bulletin board posts, and so on. In email messaging systems there are Internet-based email systems that run over

instant message application protocol (IMAP) and desktop-based programs that use post office protocol (POP) and simple message transfer protocol (SMTP) for sending and receiving email. Voice and video mail are popular extensions of text email programs. IMAP and POP systems may be integrated such that a desktop-based email program can be configured to receive IMAP messages from a message server.

-2The main difference between the IMAP and POP systems is that with IMAP a user logs into a server and reviews messages at the server via an interface also provided by the server. Data storage is at the server as well is all of the message folders, etc. The user stores no information locally. With POP, the user has a desktop email application 5

such as Exchangeâ&#x201E;˘, or OutlookTM, both popular programs from MicrosoftTM. The user uses the desktop application to contact an email server and downloads messages from the server to the desktop where they are subsequently stored. Therefore, POP users have a personal file or folder known as a .PST file that may contain all of the data used by and accessible to the desktop email application including all contact data and calendar data in

some cases. Most state-of-art desktop email applications combine multiple functionalities with standard email capabilities. One good example of this is Microsoft's Outlook TM. Outlook provides a calendar, an alert service, task scheduling, contact management, a search interface, and a summary page showing calendar items, scheduled tasks, and

summary information such as the number of unread mails and message folder totals. Many email applications like OutlookTMallow a user to create folders for special incoming messages where such users desire to segregate specific messages based on subject or some other criteria. When a message arrives at an inbox of a user, only then will that user be able to act upon the message by highlighting and selecting the message

for processing. Like many functional data processing applications, email messages in OutlookTMmay be marked, flagged, deleted, moved, duplicated, archived, saved in different file formats. With all of the organizational capabilities and tools available in a state-of-art desktop email application, there is not much automation and only very limited routing

capability available at the receiving end system or appliance. Filters can be set up to filter incoming mail for spam or unwanted messages. Security encryption can be set up to compress and encrypt messages and attachments. These additional features are often provided through plug-in modules compatible to the desktop application.

-3The inventors have observed that users of state-of-art, multi-task capable applications like MS OutlookTM typically have many folders that they have created to hold messages from specific users or to hold messages that fall under some specific category. However, messages in those folders are deposited manually by the user based 5

on user disposition. Ad-Hoc management of so many folders becomes difficult and time consuming. Many incoming messages that had not the highest priority at the time of arrival tend to disappear in these folders and may be neglected or forgotten for a time or may not be answered at all. The only typical automations of an email system are evident in task scheduling,

state alerting, and calendar-related reminders. There is not much management capability for managing the messages themselves with the exception of standard messaging commands like reply, forward, save, save as, delete, sort, compact, search, send to, mark unmark, and move to. What is clearly needed is a method and system for operating email or other

electronic message applications relative to current communication patterns and message folder topographies by creating and implementing associations between application elements. Such a system could also integrate various email application features with automated processing made available through an electronic messaging interface.

20 SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION

A problem stated above is that with all of the organizational capabilities and tools available in a state-of-art desktop email application, there is not much automation and 25

only very limited routing capability available at the receiving end system or appliance. Many messaging application utilize message folders to store messages. One byproduct of such capability is the abundance of message folders in one interface. Ad-Hoc management of so many folders becomes difficult and time consuming. Many incoming

-4messages that had not the highest priority at the time of arrival tend to disappear in these folders and may be neglected or forgotten for a time or may not be answered at all. The inventors therefore considered functional elements of a messaging system, looking for elements that exhibit potential cross relationships that could potentially be 5

harnessed to provide better management of messages and associated data but in a manner that would not be time consuming for a user. Every electronic messaging interface is characterized by one or more inbox message folders that contain incoming messages from users characterized as known contacts or unknown individuals. Most interfaces employ contact lists and a variety of

folder options to organize received messages for archiving after they are read. The present inventor realized in an inventive moment that if, at the point of access or download, electronic message could be caused to be routed to content relevant folders wherefrom they may be easily searched and located, significant improvement in organization might result. The inventor therefore constructed a unique tagging and

message routing system for electronic messaging applications that allowed messages to be routed to appropriate folders based on created associations between folders and messages to be stored therein. The tagging system may also be used to create associations between other messaging application elements thereby facilitating improved location and utilization of other data types like calendar data and task performance data

significant improvement in organizational capability and efficiency resulted with no significant learning required of the user to operate the system. Accordingly, in one embodiment of the invention a messaging application is provided comprising a user interface executable from a digital media on a computing system onboard or accessible to a computing appliance, the user interface enabling

display and access to one or more message folders, a list of contacts, a calendar, and a message generation template, and a word tagging utility installed to and executable from the digital media and made accessible through the user interface. The application is characterized in that the word tagging utility is operable to tag functional elements of the message application to create associations between the tagged elements, the associations

-5-

recognized by the messaging application in the performance of tasks involving the elements. In one embodiment, the user interface is an email interface and the computing system is a memory drive integral to the computing appliance. In another embodiment 5

the user interface is an email interface and the computing system is a server with a digital medium accessible to the computing appliance over a data network. In a variation of this embodiment the data network is the Internet network. In one embodiment the functional elements subject to tagging include at least message folders and contacts. In an extension to this embodiment the functional

elements subject to tagging further include scheduled appointments and related tasks pending. According to one aspect of the invention, a tagging system comprising a tagging utility executable from a digital storage system onboard or accessible to a computing appliance, the tagging utility having a user data input interface and a target selection

interface; a database for storing tag words and for mapping associations between tagged elements; and an application program interface to a messaging application. The tagging system is characterized in that the targets subject to tagging are functional elements stored by or made part of the messaging application and the act of tagging such elements causes the application to, based on the tag associations created, perform specific tasks

relative to the tagged elements and associations created. In one embodiment the messaging application is an email application and the storage system is a memory drive integral to the computing appliance. In another embodiment the messaging application is an email application and the storage system is a server with a digital medium accessible to the computing appliance over a data network.

In one aspect of the tagging system one of the specific tasks is routing email messages based on tag associations between from identities and message folders. According to another aspect of the invention a method is provided for routing electronic messages comprising the steps: (a) using a tagging utility, tagging one or more individual contacts with one or more tags; (b) tagging one or more existing or created

-6message folders based in part on the tagging operation of step (a) defining associations between the contacts of step (a) and the message folders by one or more common tags; (c) receiving an electronic message from one or more of the contacts the message including a subject line and a from identity; and (d) routing the electronic message to the 5

one or more message folders based on the associations defined by the tagging operation.

In one aspect of the method the messages are email messages and the message sorting is performed by an email application. In a preferred aspect in step (a) the tagging utility is executable through a control on a toolbar of a messaging application interface.

In one aspect of the method at step (d) the routing is performed after the message 10

is read by a user, the final destination for routing dependent upon user acceptance or rejection of a folder recommendation. In another aspect at step (d) the routing is performed immediately after a message has arrived and before it is accessed by a user.

In one aspect steps (a) and (b) are performed automatically a first time by crawling through a personal folder containing one or more folders and a list of contacts. 15

According to a further aspect of the invention a method is provided for routing electronic messages comprising the steps: (a) using a tagging utility, tagging one or more existing or created message folders defining associations between messaging contacts of a contact list and the message folders; (b) receiving an electronic message from one or more of the contacts the message including a subject line and a from identity; and (c)

routing the electronic message to the one or more message folders based on parsing the subject line of the message and matching that to the tags for one or more message folders.

In one aspect of this method in step (b) one or more parts of the identity of the message originator are used to define the association to an existing or created folder also tagged with one or more parts of the identity. 25

-7BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWING FIGURES

Fig. 1 is an architectural view of a communications network supporting enhanced messaging according to an embodiment of the invention. 5

Fig. 2 is an exemplary screen shot of a user interface of the application (119) of Fig. 1 according to an embodiment of the present invention. Fig. 3 is a block diagram illustrating a routing system 300 for routing or moving email messages according to one embodiment of the present invention. Fig. 4 is a block diagram illustrating a pop-up interface for managing contacts and

for viewing certain groups defined in a contact list as a tag cloud. Fig. 5 is a block diagram illustrating component layers of tagging and parsing module that may be adapted to a messaging application. Fig. 6 is an email application interface illustrating a dashboard style display of information.

Fig. 7 is an exemplary screen shot of a calendar interface invoked by interacting with a calendar button or option.

DETAILED DESCRIPTION

20 The inventor provides a messaging application that can be configured to perform automated tasks based on tag word associations created between specific elements of the application. The present invention is described in enabling detail using the various embodiments provided below. 25

Fig. 1 is an architectural view of a communications network 100 supporting enhanced messaging according to an embodiment of the invention. Communications network 100 includes a wide-area-network (WAN) 101. WAN 101 is the Internet network in one embodiment and is further defined by an Internet backbone 104 that represents all of the lines, equipment and access points that make up the Internet network

-8as a whole. Therefore, there are no geographic limitations to the practice of the present invention. In one embodiment, WAN 101 is a corporate WAN or a private network like a campus network or Intranet. In a preferred embodiment WAN 101 is the Internet 5

network and will be referred to as Internet 101 in this specification. Communications network 100 also includes exemplary sub-networks local area network (LAN) 102 and cellular (CELL) network 103. LAN 102 may represent an enterprise LAN connected to Internet network 101. LAN 102 is further defined by a LAN backbone 105. Internet 101 includes an IP routing node 106 that has connection by network access line 108 to an IP

router 107 within LAN 102. Cell network 103 may be any wireless telephone network. Cell network 103 has connection to Internet backbone 104 via an edge router or network gateway 110, an Internet access line 111 connected to router 106. Internet 101 may be accessed directly or indirectly through networks like LAN 102 and cell network 103. A messaging server 112 is provided within Internet 101 and is

connected to backbone 104. Server 112 may be a POP email server like an OutlookTM or Exchangeâ&#x201E;˘ email server. Server 112 may also represent an IMAP server such as for Yahooâ&#x201E;˘ mail, Googleâ&#x201E;˘ mail or another IMAP messaging server. In this example server 112 will be referenced as a POP email server for discussion purposes only. Email server 112 is a routing point for email and serves email messages to

authorized users who access the server to retrieve (download) their email using a desktop email application. In the event that server 112 is an IMAP server, the utility for viewing and saving email is also provided at the server. In this example sever 112 is a POP/SMTP server for incoming and outgoing emails and subscribers have desktop email applications adapted to access the server from endpoint appliances.

Those whom might have access to mail stored for delivery within server 112 include users 115 (l-n). Users 115 (l-n) are visually represented in this example by personal computers (PC) icons. Users 115 (l-n) typically access Internet 101 through a variety of different ways. Many use Internet Service provider (ISP) organizations through a telephone network or a cable modem connection through a cable network.

-9Dialup, broadband, and digital subscriber line (DSL) are all viable methods as is satellitebased Internet access. LAN backbone 105 supports multiple LAN users 114 (l-n). Users 114 (l-n) represent enterprise-based personnel with Internet access through firewall/router 107 and 5

network IP router 106. It is noted that data packets in a data packet network may take numerous different paths through the network to reach ultimate destinations. IP routers 107 and 106 as well as gateway or bridge router 110 represent logical access points more than actual components as there may be a wide variety of network hardware supporting messaging communication without departing from the spirit and scope of the present

invention. Cell network 103 includes a cellular relay tower 109 that communicates wirelessly to edge router 110 and to a variety ofInternet-capable computing appliances representing users 116, 117, and 118 accessing Internet 101 through cell network 103. The appliances represented are a Laptop (user 116), a cell phone (user 117), and a smart

phone (user 118). Users 115 (l-n) and 114 (l-n) are represented by PC icons although they to may use any Internet capable appliance that is adapted for messaging. Each appliance connected to network 101 has a desktop email application (119) installed thereon and executable there from. Email application instances 119 a-g are distributed among user appliances with instances 119 a and b displayed on PC 115 (1)

and 115 (n) and instances 119 c and d displayed on PCs 114 (1) and 114 (n). Email application instance 11ge is displayed on laptop 116; instance 119f is displayed on cell phone 117, and email application instance 119g is displayed on smart phone 118. Different versions of the email application might be provided for installation on different types of devices as is generally known. The lettering associated with element number

119 is intended only to illustrate different instances of an email application and does not signify differing versions of an email application. In this example, email messages are stored for download in email message server 112. Each user running an instance of email application (119) on the associated appliance and having an email account with the service hosting server 112 may access

- 10 server 112 while connected online to download or upload email messages as is typical in the art. In the case ofIMAP, each instance of email application (119) is accessed from server 112 while the user is connected online and does not reside on any user appliance. However, any user may integrate an IMAP account with a desktop application so they 5

can use a desktop interface to access and to download IMAP messages. The inventor provides a way for users to interact with the messaging system represented herein by server 112 and application instances (119 a-g) using created associations between specific elements of the messaging application. As was described with reference to the background section of this specification, email data including

folders messages calendar task and contact information may be held in a file known as a PST file or personal folder for each user of an email account. This file is generally stored locally on digital media associated with the user's appliance. In some cases there is more than one PST file for a single user. Therefore, all of the data required by the local email application to operate

correctly with the user's added information is stored in the PST folder. The associations created between email application elements are, in a preferred embodiment, tag-based using a tagging engine (illustrated later in this specification) to apply one or more tagwords or phrases to email application content. In one specific use-case an individual may create one or more specialized email folders and may supply one or more tags (tag

words) to each folder. Email messages may then be moved from the inbox and be deposited into these message folders based on subject line parsing, from identification data (usemame/domain) or content parsing. An individual may also tag contacts in a list of email contacts with one or more tag words or phrases that are similar or identical to tagged mail folders. In this way any email from a tagged contact will be moved into one

or more tagged message folders according to tag association between the contact and the folder or folders. Processes other than message routing that occur during interaction with a messaging system may be enhanced by permitting a user to tag specific application elements associated with the processes. Certain calendar functions, scheduling

- 11 -

processes, and task reminder processes can be enhanced by tagging specific elements associated with those processes. In one embodiment, a tag server and database 120 is provided within Internet 101 and may be adapted to maintain all of the tag word associations created by all subscribers 5

of the messaging system. Tag server 120 may hold tags for online subscribers who have created them to tag specific application elements such as contacts or message folders. Still another tag server 113 is represented within LAN 102 connected to LAN backbone 105. The use of tag servers may be more appropriate with an IMAP system where most

ifnot all of the data displayed on a user's appliance screen is server-based data. However, tag servers 113 and 120 may also represent centralized social tag banks that store email or message tags given to users by other users. In such an embodiment a message recipient can tag any incoming emails and those tags, uploaded to the tag server can thus be associated with the from identification data (username/domain) of the tagged

user. In one case a user may tag another user only if the user reply's to the email message from the user to be tagged. In this case, the tags may include hyperlinks enabling mail recipients to discover more information about a message originator. In any case a user may be able to view the tags of any tagged user who sends them an email message and may tag the user in a reply message in a fashion similar to Folksonomy.

Tags may be descriptive tags based on the experience of the recipient in correspondence with a particular user. At the server, tags may be hyperlink enabled to server more information about a user to those viewing tags of the user. More detail about using tags such as tag words or phrases to create associations between message application elements will e provided below.

Fig. 2 is an exemplary screen shot of a user interface 200 of application 119 according to an embodiment of the present invention. Interface 200 has a title bar 201 labeled Inbox. A user may minimize, close, or re-size interface 201 by manipulating the control boxes at the far right of the bar as is the case with typical interface screens. Screen 200 also includes a menu bar 202 typical of browser-based email interfaces.

- 12 Drop-down menu options typical to email interfaces are available like File, Edit, and View and so on including a search input box to access help files. Interface 200 includes a menu bar 206 having menu options typical of an email inbox interface like new message, print, back, and close icons. Typical email menu options Reply, Reply All, Forward, 5

Send/Receive, Find are also typical. In one embodiment email interface 200 is a Microsoft OutlookTM interface enhanced to practice the invention. In another embodiment interface 200 is from MS Exchangeâ&#x201E;˘, or another known and existing inbox email interface. In this example, a search option is provided to the right on menu bar 206 for

searching a list of email contacts. A user name or email address may be used as search criteria to find and display a contact from the list. According to an enhancement made possible through the present invention, a user may search the contact list using a tag word or phrase as search criteria. In this embodiment the user has tagged one or more contacts in a list of email contacts and is now able to use those tags to locate and display a target

contact without using a username or email address in the search. In one embodiment an additional search enhancement may be provided to enable a user to search through email folders or through all folders for messages using a tag word or tag phrase as search criteria. In one embodiment a same tag word may be used to tag more than one contact creating a loose association of those contacts bound by one or more common tags. These

loose associations or groups may be temporary owning to current workflow and communications patterns. Menu bar 206 may include yet more options 207 than are visible in this example. In this configuration interface 200 has a left navigation pane or window 203. Window 203 may be scrollable in most embodiments and can be adjusted in window

space or size relative to the rest of the display. Pane 203 is displaying multiple mail or message folders in an array typical of OutlookTM. The top of the pane bears the title Mail followed by a listing 212 of favorite folders. Favorite folders is a simple grouping of most used or most popular mail folders similar to favorite Web sites listed in a browser menu. A user may manually add message folders to a favorites list or they may be

- 13 -

automatically added based on some configured rule like the top ten most used folders for example. Any of the favorite folders may have sub-folders associated thereto that are navigated in hierarchical order according to a typical folder/sub-folder file system. Only 5

the favorite folders are visible in this example. Below the label "favorite" folders 212 pane 203 includes a mapping 213 of all created mail folders organized by a hierarchy typical of a windows folder system. A folder labeled server design is one of three subfolders in a sub-folder of the second main folder listed. A user may navigate folders and sub-folders in typical fashion by clicking on a main folder to expose the next level of

sub-folders. The display options Calendar and Contacts are provided at the bottom of pane 203 which is open in this case to show Mail in the interface. An option "More" is provided to navigate to additional display options. In this case a center pane or window 204 displays the email main Inbox as is illustrated in title at the top of the window. Window 204

shows all of the unread and read (if configured) email messages in line item list according to some pre-configured message sorting rule or option provided. There are many sort options available with most programs. Inbox pane 204 is scrollable in a preferred embodiment. Only one email message 211 is illustrated in window 204 but there may be many messages in the displayed list. Message 211 has an icon indicating

that there is an attachment with the message. It has a "from" field for identifying the sender of the message. Message 211 has a subject field for identifying the subject line of the message. Message 211 has a receive-date field that identifies which day message 211 was sent from the originator. A size field informs the user of the total size of the email message including any or all attachments.

In this case message 211 is from a contact named Gia and has a subject line including the words server and front. The receive date field is configured to make visible only the day but not the time of receipt. In this case the message was received today. The attachment(s) and message size is listed in the size field. More or fewer descriptive fields may be provided as desired.

- 14 A message review pane 205 is configured to display to the right of the message inbox pane 204. Review pane 205 enables review of the text body 215 of message 211 without opening the message in its own window. In another embodiment the review pane may be displayed below the inbox pane. In review the full title and message text body 5

215 is displayed. Window 205 is also scrollable in a preferred embodiment. One enhancement in this example is that the email application is configured to make recommendations to the user as to where (mail folder) the message (211) should be filed. A recommendation box 207 is provided that displays a recommended folder for the user to move the message to. In this case a folder exists that is tagged server design. It

may have more tags that just server design, but server design may be a primary tag that is displayed according to its popularity. In this case the interface includes a content parser that is at least able to parse a subject line of an email message. The recommendation then results from the tag word server that is parsed from the subj ect line of email 211. The recommendation enable the user to decide if server design will be the containing folder or

if some other folder will be the contain folder for the message. In this example an information summary box 210 is provided that also has a move

control feature for moving the email into the recommended folder or into another one by design. Information summary box contains links to gather more information about the email and the contact that originated the email. A summary information link may, when 20

invoked, bring up a second floating window or some other mechanism that contains profile information on Gia including picture and full name. The summary may include any email contact data the user has input into the system for Gia. Statistics collected about the interactions between the user and Gia may be provided through a link to statistics. An available statistic might be the total number of messages received from

Gia. Another statistic might by the average size of attachments sent by Gia. Many other stats are possible. Summary information may include profile data from third party sites if authorized such as from LinkedInâ&#x201E;˘, FaceBookTM , or other service providers. An option for adding a message originator as a contact in a contact list is provided within information box 210. In addition to adding the contact, an option is provided for

- 15 enabling the user to tag the contact applying one or more tags. In one embodiment the user may tag a contact with one or more tag words or phrases shared by an existing message folder thus creating an association for routing email received from the contact to the folder. In one embodiment a contact may be tagged with tags from more than one 5

mail folder causing replication of the message into those folders when a message is received in the inbox. A tag can be a username a domain name, a group name, or some other contrived tag that makes sense to the user. In one embodiment a contact may be tagged by other users through the email messages the contact sends to those users in a fashion similar to Folksonomy. The

aggregate of tags associated with the username and email domain may be held for access in a third party tag server connected to the primary network such as tag server 120 connected to Internet backbone 104 described further above. In this embodiment when an email message downloads or is otherwise accessible, the receiving user may select a link to view tags created for that message originator. The tags may be descriptive tag

words that include hyperlinks to more information about the originator of the message. If a downloaded message is from a contact already in the receiver's contact list and tagged by the receiver, then the receiver of the message may view all of the originator's tags or just the tags created by the receiver of the message. Those tags may also be used locally to route or move the downloaded message to a mail folder sharing the one or more of the

tag words. Message review pane 205 has additional information columns 208 and 209 that are provided and adapted to contain additional statistical data. Column 208 is related to calendar information and gives the user some status information based on an appointment schedule of the user. In this case the information includes, for a specified time window,

the number of appointments completed and the number of appointments that are still pending within the time window. Information that an appointment has been completed, aside from the fact that the scheduled time for the appointment is past, may be augmented by some data input from the user related to a result or some workflow stemming from the appointment interaction.

- 16 Information 208 may also be provided elsewhere in the interface such as within summary pane 210 or in a display invoked by selecting calendar from navigation options 214. Information column 209 contains the usemames and domains (email addresses) for any persons that were carbon copied (CC) in message 211 by the originator. Another piece of 5

information provided within column 209 is the average time for reply. In this case the receiver of message 211 has emailed the message originator "Gia" and has received reply messages to those emails. The statistic is an average of the reply-time windows. A reply window may be defined as the time passing from the time Gia received a message from the user until the time that Gia sent a reply to that message. These and other statistics

may be routinely provided in the Inbox view or in other views available from interface 200.

In one embodiment controls for viewing certain statistics may be provided in a main tool bar provided on the display or in any other tool bar that may be installed to the display. Such statistics may include but are not limited to: 15

• • • • •

Number of emails today Number of spam mails today Number of emails ear marked Number of unread emails from known sources N ext upcoming appointment

20 A control might be provided that enables a user to see all the persons responsible for replying to an original message or messages sent by the user, that is to say, view the email reply chain. In one embodiment the persons on an email correspondence thread may be viewed by entering a tag or tags into a search box. Another control may be 25

provided that enable a user to highlight any message from the inbox and display all of the mail folders that contain messages from the originator of the highlighted message.

In one embodiment a feature is provided that enables a user to assemble or display a tag cloud representing a group of contacts or any portion of a list of contacts

- 17 where the last email received from each contact represented in the cloud is listed in a message VIew pane. Fig. 3 is a block diagram illustrating a routing system 300 for routing or moving email messages according to one embodiment of the present invention. A main message 5

folder 301 is illustrated and has the primary label or tag Active Projects. A sub-folder 302 is illustrated and associated with main folder 301 and is tagged Network indicating that the folder contains information related to network projects that are currently active. A sub-folder 303 is illustrated and associated with sub-folder 302 further down in the hierarchy and has a tag H-23 Server.

An incoming or downloaded email message 310 may be moved or routed into any one of the related folders depending on a parse of at least the subject line of the message. Email message 310 indicates at least the originator and the subj ect line. In this case a word parser is provided to parse at least the subject line of an email message. Usemame or handle and email domain (from) may also be parsed as well. A message router 308 is

provided and has direct communication with word parser 309. Message router 308 is adapted to move message 310 into an appropriate mail folder based on a parsed result communicated to the router by the word parser matched against tag words representing mail folders stored in a database 307. Each folder has one or more tags that can be viewed as a tag cloud. Main folder

301 has a tag cloud 304 that includes the tag active projects and may include other similar or synonymous tags. Sub-folder 302 has a tag cloud 305 that includes the tag network and may include other similar or synonymous tags. Sub-folder 303 has a tag cloud 306 that includes the tag H-23 server and may include other similar or synonymous tags. All of the tags and the folders association mapping may be kept in database 307

and rendered searchable by message router 308. In this case email message 310 is parsed for subj ect line by word parser 309. The

parser communicates the parsed information to message router 308. Router 308 checks the information against the folder system and tags in an attempt to match the subject line to one or more tags used to describe mail folders. In this case, if the term H-23 server is

- 18 not in the subj ect line but the term network proj ects is in the subj ect line, then the message may be automatically moved to folder 302 if not to both folders 302 and 301. In one embodiment a replicated message may be treated as a single message in that if one instance is manipulated, the result applies to all of the live instances or copies of the 5

message. Message router 308 can control cutting and pasting of an email message between folders automatically and without user assistance. In this case email message 310 is deposited into sub-folder 302 tagged Network. If the subject line included the term H-23, then the message would likely have been routed to sub-folder 303 transparently to the

user. An alert may be given the user about the routing of a message to ensure that the task was performed to the satisfaction of the user. If the result is ambiguous and it is difficult to determine with certainty which folder should be the folder that contains the message a recommendation may be given to the user by the messaging application. The recommendation may be based upon any information known to the system about the

message and the message originator or sender. The recommendation interface may include a check box that requests that in the future just route emails from this sender according to subj ect line and do not ask for a confirmation. In another embodiment tags represented in database 307 may include contact tags that were created for contacts in a contact list. In this case the originator of message 310

may share one or more tags with a message folder causing movement of the message into the folder as soon as the message hits the end appliance. Providing more than one tag word or phrase to each folder helps to associate an email message to a folder by providing more flexibility for the subject of the message. A rule may exist for placing a message in the next folder up in a folder hierarchy if all of a folder tag is not matched by

the parsed subject line of the message. For example, a subject line that read server maintenance proposal but not H-23, the message may be put in folder 302 network even though the tag network was not found in the subject line. Furthermore, parsing may be performed on the first few lines in the message body as well as in the subject line.

- 19 If a message originator is not in a receiver list of contacts then an opportunity to add the email contact information and to apply one or more tags for the new contact might be undertaken. In this process a folder option for creating a new folder may also be presented. For example, a new project may just be setting up with new people that are 5

not yet known to the user. Therefore the user may not as yet define the email collaborators on the project and has no contact information on them or tags created for them. A folder for the new project may not yet exist. However, when a first mail relative to the new project is downloaded, a recommendation engine (not illustrated) may be active and may prompt the user to add the contact, tag the content, and to create a folder

for storing messages related to the new project. The folder may be tagged with one or more descriptive tag words. Content parsing or tag association between contact and folder may be used to determine end routing of the message and of other messages that will be forthcoming. If a first contact has a company domain and the user knows that all of the other

emails that will be received about the new project will originate from the same domain then the domain may be used to pre-group contacts once they are identified. For example, @ serversonics.com may be the domain of a company whose personnel are approved to collaborate on the H-23 server project (folder 303). A rule that causes the messaging application contact interface to automatically group all new contacts having

that original domain in their email addresses may be set up by the user. In this way all emails are routed to the appropriate folder and if from new originators saved as contacts in the group expressed by the domain name. Fig. 4 is a block diagram illustrating a pop-up interface 400 for managing contacts and for viewing certain groups defined in a contact list as a tag cloud. Interface 400 may

display as a result of interacting with a manage contacts option 401 accessible through interface 200. Interface 400 may include a footprint 402 that is large enough in display to accommodate one or more search options 403. Search option 403 may enable a user to search contacts by entering a name, email address, or by tag. A browse option using an

- 20alphabetical map may also be provided. An input field may be provided along with a search button for searching the list based on the entered criterion. Interface 400 may include several tag and tag management options 406. Options 406 may include tag view options for viewing all tags or user-created tags (your tags) for 5

any contact. An option for viewing a tagged group may be provided as well as an option for viewing all of the tags in a group. Options 406 include one for adding and removing tags and one for tagging and creating a folder. Another option 406 is one for auto tagging without user involvement. Such options can be ordered and scheduled. In one embodiment a link is provided in interface 400 for enabling execution of a

content tagging engine by the user wherein the contact tagging engine has its own unique interface aside from interface 200. In another embodiment the tagging interface is a plug-in to the email or messaging application and may be executed from within the application to manually tag elements of the email application like folders and contacts. When a contact is located in the contact list by conducting a search, a contact profile box

or window 404 may be provided. Profile 404 may include a picture, contact information, work related information, and so on. Block 405 illustrates application of tag clouds for a group or category of contacts assembled by the user or automatically by the application. For example, the category Family may be represented by a tag cloud having all of the tags of at least the primary

tags of the individual family members included therein. By viewing the tag cloud for family, one may be able to discern which family member sends the most emails or is the most emailed of the family members. Other criteria may also be applied to enable discernment and separation of one family member over the others. Such discernment is observed, of course, in the evolution of the font characteristics and or appearance of the

tag itself as compared to the other tags in the cloud. A tag view may include the options of viewing a tag cloud or a list of tags. The category business may be represented by a tag cloud including all of the primary tags of the individual business contacts in the contact list. The same can be said of the categories Friends. A group of contacts may be represented by a tag cloud. An

- 21 individual contact may also be represented by a tag cloud including more than one tag given to the contact. A group may be a loosely associated bunch of contacts that share a common tag that would suggest a common affiliation or interest shared among the contacts. An example might be applying the tag association member to every contact in 5

the list who belongs to a specific association. An individual may have more than one tag but may exhibit a primary tag as it is born out over time that the contact is most often associated with one tag through searching, routing, or other activity. It is noted herein that contacts in a contact list may simply be associated to folders

having names by rule instead of by tagging, but may still have one or more tags for other 10

purposes like grouping or searching. In another embodiment a contact may have many tags applied to the contact by users tagging email messages received from the contact. These tags may be stored in a central network location by a third party that manages the tags. From a social aspect then, when a user receives an email from an unknown source, the user may view the originators tags associated with that email identity to determine

whether the originator may be interesting to the user. Fig. 5 is a block diagram illustrating component layers of tagging and parsing module 500 that may be adapted to a messaging application. Module 500 may be thought of as a tagging utility that includes search and routing capabilities. Module 500 may be provides as a plug-in installation that is executable from within an affected

application. Module 500 includes a message application program interface 501 for managing integration of the parsing, tagging, and specialized search functions provided by the module to options and services available in the messaging application. In one embodiment the tagging utility is adapted to crawl through a user's personal folder or (PST) file and to tag and create folders for depositing email into. This operation may be

performed first upon installation of the plug-in. Subsequent executions of this process are electable. A message attribute and content parser 502 is provided as part of module 500 and provides the ability to parse message attributes (usemame/domain), message subject line, and in some cases message body content to the messaging application. This capability

- 22can be configured to automatically parse messages in the inbox to determine which mail folders will be recommended for deposit of the message. In one embodiment a user reads messages before a routing recommendation is presented to the user. In another embodiment the routing is automatic and occurs immediately after download of 5

messages. A message router recommendation interface 503 is provided to enable user interaction relative to endpoint routing of email messages. A tag view/search engine and interface component 504 is provided to enhance the email applications search function for contacts and provides the ability to represent elements as tag clouds or tag lists. A

content tagging engine and interface 505 is provided that enables a user to manually tag elements of a messaging application like folders and contacts. The tagging engine and interface are executable from within the email application. Module 500 includes an interface to a tag word database that may contain all of the tags a user has created relative to the email application the module plugs into. The

tag word database maintains all of the tags and associations inferred by the tagging operations. The tag word database may be supported by any digital media accessible to the appliance hosting the messaging application and plug-in. In one embodiment, a single plug-in may contain sufficient features to support more than one email or messaging application.

In one embodiment, module 500 is installable to an existing messaging

application like OutlookTM , for example, and provides all of the required tool bars and controls for executing and managing the progress of available features provided by the module. Other components may also be included within module 500 without departing from the spirit and scope of the invention such as algorithms for providing statistical 25

calculations relative to messages, folders, contacts, appointments, and so on. In one embodiment the features and functions enabled by module 500 are bundled

in with a proprietary email application that can be used as a desktop application. In another embodiment where a server manages all user data in an IMAP scenario the

- 23 features and functions may be provided with the server-based email program and are generally available to all of the subscribers. Fig. 6 is an email application interface 600 illustrating a dashboard style display of information. Interface 600 has a message view window 601 that provides a summary 5

of unread messages that have been downloaded to the user's application. Window 601 is scrollable in a preferred embodiment. Interface 600 may be configured to display a general tag cloud 602 or tag list if so desired that includes all of the tags that saw action over a specified period of time, in this case, for the current day. The cloud or list may be configured for an hour, or for some smaller or greater period than one day. The tags may

be a mixed bag including tags for contacts, messages, folders, appointments, calendar days, etc. Interface 600 includes a message search interface 603 where a user may search messages by tag. Specific folders may be searched or all messages in all folders may be searched. Other conditions may also be configured into the search such as search only

unread messages. Interface 600 includes an interactive scale 604 for measuring the level of business of a user for any given period of time. A level of business for a user may be calculated based on number of appointments, number of emails to be processed by the user, or some other workflow related criteria. In this case busyness levels for a day, a week, and a month, are provided by default. A user simply enters the date in one or more

of the option date fields and invokes the check button to retrieve the information. The level may be expressed as a colored bar graph or some other graphic that marks a specified level. A user may create a busyness level scale such as between 1 and 5 with 1 being not busy and 5 being very busy and then represent the scale as a bar colored to the level of business. In another embodiment an indicator may be provided that shows a

color such as green for a low level, yellow for a median level, and red for a higher level. The user may be enabled to define the weight relative to what actually constitutes busy and the criterion used to determine the weight. Such a feature may be useful in enabling the user to plan commitments more efficiently by spreading them out over time to mitigate low and high levels of busyness.

- 24Interface 600 has a link button 605 to a calendar feature of the email application. Invoking link 605 opens a calendar interface. Busyness levels may also be annotated over a calendar week view or month view. Interface 600 includes an email deposit summary section 606. In this example, the deposit summary lists all of the emails that 5

have been deposited in folders today. The interface is switched to Folder view by default and shows a main folder or work folder with the total emails 15. Under work there is a folder for sales, a folder for new products, and a folder for internal communications. All of the 15 emails are deposited into sub-folders of main folder work. There are 5 email messages in the folder sale leads. There are 3 email messages in the folder new products.

There are 7 email messages in the folder internal communications. Summary interface 606 shows the total number of unread messages under the category work and the number of the total deposited under each sub-category of work. Other hierarchies may be observed without departing from the spirit and scope of the invention. Message view 601 shows the message line information for the 15 email messages

in each of the folders. Under the folder sales leads there are assumed 5 messages only 3 of which are illustrated for discussion purposes. Under New it may be assumed there are 3 line items and under Internal it may be assumed that there are 7 line items. Tag cloud 602 may contain the primary tags associated with the "from" identities of the 15 messages. Clicking on a tag of a contact like Jim or Jane, for example may invoke the

opening of a message that is yet unread in a mail folder. Interface 600 may be configured to display a number of different information blocks or sections in a number of different ways. In one embodiment a user may clear tag cloud 602 by answering or at least reading all of the messages represented in the cloud, or just by invoking a clear option. The cloud may build again in real time as new

activity occurs like deposit of a new message. The user may quickly recognize a tag just appearing in the cloud as one that has high priority at the time thereby serving as adequate notification that a high priority message has just been downloaded to an inbox or other folder from the message server. Other appearing tags may not carry as high of a priority in the mind of the user at that time indicating arrival of messages that at the time

- 25 are not important. Those tags may be ignored or eventually cleared from the cloud. Tag cloud 602 may be tied strictly to incoming messages and can be made to take up the entire footprint of the interface. The cloud may also be configured to make a sound when a new tag appears in the interface. 5

Fig. 7 is an exemplary screen shot of a calendar interface 700 invoked by interacting with a calendar button or option. In this case interface 700 is setup to display a number of items in a display window 701 similar to a summary or dashboard interface that may be configured or personalized by a user to display only desired items in display modes selected by the user.

A calendar week view 702 is illustrated that shows the days ordered by a user by inputting a beginning date. The system provides the additional 6 days from the beginning date entered. In this case the view shows Sun through the following Saturday. Appointments on certain days of the week are indicated. An arrow illustrates where in current time frame the week is. The current time frame is Wednesday morning meaning

that at the time of display it is early Wednesday. A tag cloud 705 is illustrated and includes the tags representing the same days of the same week illustrated in the calendar view 702. The tags Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday are enlarged to show the importance of those days having appointments that must be met. The tag Wednesday is just larger in font size than and Tuesday and

Thursday indicating a slightly higher importance level for the activities slated for Wednesday. A user may weight importance levels based on workflow priority considerations. Tag cloud 705 and calendar view 702 may be set up to show periods shorter or longer than a week. The tags in cloud 705 may represent days, weeks, months, or other defined periods. Although not specifically illustrated in this example, a tag

cloud for scheduled appointments may be provided wherein the tags included in the cloud represent those scheduled appointments. Display window 701 includes a snapshot slider bar adapted to identify and retrieve a historical snapshot of the interface and displayed activity. A snapshot in time report may span a day, a week, or a larger period. A data storage facility may be provided

- 26that is accessible to the interface and snapshot utility so that the correct information may be displayed as it was during the period in history. A slider is provided to enable a user to easily go back in increments of time to cause another display of the interface that is appropriate for the time point indicated. Time may be represented in slices and a report 5

spanning a larger period of time would contain multiple time-point snapshots or slices assembled sequentially for review. A summary information block 704 is provided in window 701 and indicates the number of appointments completed and the number of appointments pending for the week illustrated in calendar view 702. The indication of appointments completed may require more data than the fact

that the appointment times have past as indicated by the arrow. An appointment can be missed or rescheduled. The indication of complete for an appointment may depend on some result of the meeting that is entered into the user's system during or after the appointment.

In this example a tag cloud 707 is provided that includes tags representing tasks 15

that must be completed before upcoming appointments are conducted. An interactive button 711 labeled view related tasks enables the user to view in detail any requirements associated with any pending appointment. In the tag cloud, the user may readily see that a PowerPointâ&#x201E;˘ sales presentation (PPT._Sales) is required and is a priority, perhaps because of the lead time needed to prepare the document correctly. By clicking on the

tag, the user may see the additional information such as which meeting the presentation is required for and any additional information about the meeting. Perhaps the meeting on Thursday is a sales meeting and the user is required to present at the meeting. Other task tags include prepare contract, read spec, and prepare spread sheet on a marketing plan (SP Sheet_MP).

A tag cloud 706 is illustrated in this example within window 701 and includes a tag view of target contacts associated with the appointments for the week illustrated. Interacting with anyone of the tags may cause additional information like contact information and the associated meeting information and scheduling data. Another tag cloud 710 is provided within display window 701 and includes folder tags of folders

- 27 containing unread messages associated with the pending appointments on the calendar for the week. The presence of a folder tag here indicates at least one message relative to a contact involved with a meeting is residing in the folder. The larger the font for a tag, the more messages the folder contains from contacts 5

involved in one or more of the scheduled meetings or appointments. The tags are also topical of the themes or goals of the appointments or meetings. For example, the tag "Sales" may represent a folder topical to a planned sales meeting on "Thursday" (calendar day tag) at which the Power Point presentation (task tag) will be made to employees of a company with the email domainsales.com. New messages in the sales

folder may be requests related to this pending presentation. In this calendar interface all of the tag clouds are related to the appointment schedule of the user in a specific way and the tags within the clouds may be interacted with to glean more information and the correct associations between the tags. It will be apparent to one with skill in the art that the tagging and parsing system

of the invention may be provided using some or all of the mentioned features and components without departing from the spirit and scope of the present invention. It will also be apparent to the skilled artisan that the embodiments described above are exemplary of inventions that may have far greater scope than any of the singular descriptions. There may be many alterations made in the descriptions without departing

from the spirit and scope of the present invention.

- 28 What is claimed is:

1. A messaging application comprising: a user interface executable from a digital media on a computing system onboard 5

or accessible to a computing appliance, the user interface enabling display and access to one or more message folders, a list of contacts, a calendar, and a message generation template; and a word tagging utility installed to and executable from the digital media and made accessible through the user interface;

characterized in that the word tagging utility is operable to tag functional elements of the message application to create associations between the tagged elements, the associations recognized by the messaging application in the performance of tasks involving the elements.

2. The messaging application of claim 1 wherein the user interface is an email interface and the computing system is a memory drive integral to the computing appliance.

3. The messaging system of claim 1 wherein the user interface is an email interface and the computing system is a server with a digital medium accessible to the computing 20

appliance over a data network.

4. The system of claim 3 wherein the data network is the Internet network.

5. The messaging application of claim 1 wherein the functional elements subject to 25

tagging include at least message folders and contacts.

6. The messaging application of claim 5 wherein the functional elements subject to tagging further include scheduled appointments and related tasks pending.

- 297. A tagging system comprising: a tagging utility executable from a digital storage system onboard or accessible to a computing appliance, the tagging utility having a user data input interface and a target selection interface; 5

a database for storing tag words and for mapping associations between tagged elements; and an application program interface to a messaging application; characterized in that the targets subj ect to tagging are functional elements stored by or made part of the messaging application and the act of tagging such elements causes

the application to, based on the tag associations created, perform specific tasks relative to the tagged elements and associations created.

8. The tagging system of claim 7 wherein the messaging application is an email application and the storage system is a memory drive integral to the computing appliance. 15 9. The tagging system of claim 7 wherein the messaging application is an email application and the storage system is a server with a digital medium accessible to the computing appliance over a data network.

10. The tagging system of claim 7 wherein one of the specific tasks is routing email messages based on tag associations between from identities and message folders.

11. A method for routing electronic messages comprising the steps: (a) using a tagging utility, tagging one or more individual contacts with one or 25

more tags; (b) tagging one or more existing or created message folders based in part on the tagging operation of step (a) defining associations between the contacts of step (a) and the message folders by one or more common tags;

- 30 (c) receiving an electronic message from one or more of the contacts the message including a subject line and a from identity; and (d) routing the electronic message to the one or more message folders based on the associations defined by the tagging operation. 5

12. The method of claim 11 wherein the messages are email messages and the message sorting is performed by an email application.

13. The method of claim 11 wherein in step (a) the tagging utility is executable through a 10

control on a toolbar of a messaging application interface.

14. The method of claim 11 wherein at step (d) the routing is performed after the message is read by a user, the final destination for routing dependent upon user acceptance or rejection of a folder recommendation. 15 15. The method of claim 11 wherein in step (d) the routing is performed immediately after a message has arrived and before it is accessed by a user.

16. The method of claim 11 wherein steps (a) and (b) are performed automatically a first 20

time by crawling through a personal folder containing one or more folders and a list of contacts.

17. A method for routing electronic messages comprising the steps: (a) using a tagging utility, tagging one or more existing or created message 25

folders defining associations between messaging contacts of a contact list and the message folders; (b) receiving an electronic message from one or more of the contacts the message including a subject line and a from identity; and

- 31 (c) routing the electronic message to the one or more message folders based on parsing the subject line of the message and matching that to the tags for one or more message folders.

18. The method of claim 17 wherein in step (b) one or more parts of the identity of the message originator are used to define the association to an existing or created folder also tagged with one or more parts of the identity.

- 32 ABSTRACT OF THE DISCLOSURE

A messaging application includes a user interface executable from a digital media on a computing system onboard or accessible to a computing appliance, the user interface 5

enabling display and access to one or more message folders, a list of contacts, a calendar, and a message generation template, and a word tagging utility installed to and executable from the digital media and made accessible through the user interface. The application is characterized in that the word tagging utility is operable to tag functional elements of the message application to create associations between the tagged elements, the associations

recognized by the messaging application in the performance of tasks involving the elements.

Electronic Patent Application Fee Transmittal Application Number: Filing Date:

Title of Invention:

System for Creating Associations Between Elements of a Message Application

First Named Inventor/Applicant Name:

Puneet K. Gupta

Filer:

Donald Rex Boys/Sheri Beasley

Attorney Docket Number:

15000

Filed as Small Entity

Utility under 35 USC 111 (a) Filing Fees Description

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4011

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2111

255

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2201

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Amount

Sub-Total in USD($)

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Total in USD ($)

540

Electronic Acknowledgement Receipt EFSID:

3928564

Application Number:

12208902

International Application Number: Confirmation Number:

3415

Title of Invention:

System for Creating Associations Between Elements of a Message Application

First Named Inventor/Applicant Name:

Puneet K. Gupta

Customer Number:

24739

Filer:

Donald Rex Boys/Sheri Beasley

Filer Authorized By:

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Attorney Docket Number:

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Receipt Date:

11-SEP-2008

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Utility under 35 USC 111 (a)

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