The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Use of electronic message communication systems has increased significantly in the recent past. In the specific context of the Internet, electronic mail (“e-mail”) is now widely used for marketing campaigns and other communications with actual or prospective customers by manufacturers, merchants, service providers and other bulk senders. Using modern electronic systems, the cost of sending even millions of such messages has been negligible, and a response rate of even less than one percent has been considered worthwhile. Thus, successful delivery of messages to valid in-boxes of recipients normally translates into income for the sender.
In one approach, a sender develops a mailing list consisting of e-mail addresses of targeted individuals. The sender also creates a master message or template for an e-mail directed to the targeted individuals. The master message and the mailing list are provided to a mail gateway or other sending device, which dispatches a copy of the master message to each address on the mailing list.
Typically, the sending device is identified in the Internet by a single Internet Protocol (“IP”) address, which is placed in the source IP address field of outbound IP packets representing the messages. Often messages directed to individuals in the list are first received at an inbound mail gateway associated with an Internet Service Provider (“ISP”), large business enterprise or other receiver that receives a large daily volume of messages from various sources.
However, with this approach many of the messages may fail to be delivered, because many such receivers now use filtering and blocking technology intended to prevent delivery of mass unsolicited e-mail messages (“spam”). For example, when the inbound mail gateways of certain receivers detect numerous inbound messages all having the same source IP address, the receivers may refuse to deliver the messages. The receivers also may establish filters that prevent future delivery of similar messages. This may occur even when the messages are not “spam,” but rather legitimate communications to members, customers or other individuals who have done business with the sender in the past or agreed to receive its messages.
In one approach, receivers use filtering or blocking technologies that search for keywords in the message subject line and reject or quarantine messages that contain keywords matching a list of prohibited words. In another approach, receivers use “black lists” to identify and prohibit display of messages from suspect senders. Some receivers augment these technologies with personal “white lists” of friends or other acceptable senders; only messages from senders in the “white list” are admitted. The “white lists” and “black lists” also may come from networked sources. Techniques for performing “black list” lookups are described at the document “ip4r.htm” that is available online at the time of this writing at director “/junkmail/support/” of the “declude.com” domain of the World Wide Web.
For legitimate senders, one problem is that legitimate messages do not reach intended receivers because they are blocked by such filtering or blocking technologies. Meanwhile, receivers who use filtering or blocking technologies regularly fail to receive legitimate messages because the filtering and blocking technologies cannot properly distinguish legitimate messages from unwanted messages. Certain industry-standard technical abbreviations may be identical to prohibited keywords, confusing the “spam” filter.
Further, receivers continue to receive large volumes of unwanted messages that are not properly trapped by the “spam” filter. As a result, many receivers now refuse to disclose their address except under limited circumstances. In response, many legitimate senders, such as reputable commercial enterprises, have developed “opt-in” procedures in which the addresses of receivers, such as customers, are not used at all unless the receiver affirmatively agrees to receive messages. Even when this is done, the filtering or blocking technologies may delete or quarantine even those messages from legitimate senders that are directed to receivers who have “opted in.”
Consequently, the value of e-mail as a legitimate marketing tool for communications directed to receivers who have “opted in” is decreasing. Many receivers remain essentially defenseless to the daily onslaught of “spam” arriving in their e-mail in-boxes. While many states have enacted legislation that imposes civil or criminal penalties for sending “spam,” these remedies are time-consuming for receivers to pursue. In addition, while many Internet Service Providers (“ISPs”) actively identify and refuse to communicate or do business with those who send “spam,” policing such improper activity imposes a significant cost on the ISP.
ISPs also incur costs associated with processing messages directed to recipients who do not hold an account with the ISP. For these recipients, the ISP's mail system typically generates an automatic “bounce” message that states that the recipient is unknown. Indeed, a “double bounce” may occur when a message bears an invalid sender address, and is sent to an invalid recipient. Costs are associated with maintaining the equipment and software that generates the bounce messages, and for dispatching the bounce messages back into the network to the sender. Thus, there is a need for a system or method that can reduce the number of“bounce” and “double bounce” events experienced by ISPs and derived from unwanted messages.
Thus, the problem of “spam” in the Internet e-mail context is essentially a war of attrition. There are legitimate marketing organizations that send promotional messages by bulk e-mail, and other senders who send valid bulk messages. In general, however, no one benefits from the activities of “spammers,” other than the “spammers” themselves. ISPs, business enterprises, and end users all suffer inconvenience, costs, and annoyances.
Further, high-value e-mail messages regularly may be blocked or placed into a “Bulk” mail folder, based on rules that appear, to the end user, as complex, random, changing and secret. This costs e-mail marketers, and causes senders to lose confidence in the benefits of e-mail marketing. Moreover, end users are required to invest time in monitoring, checking, delivering, and negotiating “white lists” and similar mechanisms. Even when ISPs and enterprises use anti-“spam” technologies, large numbers of“spam” messages still arrive in the in-boxes of end users, or erroneously are placed in bulk mail folders.
While the foregoing example problems exist in the context of e-mail, telephone and facsimile communications suffer from analogous problems.
Based on the foregoing, there is a need in this field for a way to permit senders to dispatch messages in a manner that prevents unwarranted blocking by receivers. There is a specific need for an improved e-mail gateway that can send bulk e-mail over the Internet to targeted recipients, without blocking or filtering by spam blocking technology employed by receivers such as ISPs and large enterprises.
One possible alternative approach would be to assign a different mail gateway to each sender. However, this approach is not cost-effective because it requires too much expensive hardware. Further, this approach is an incomplete solution, because bulk senders who initiate multiple different marketing or messaging “campaigns” to different lists of users may find that after receivers receive one campaign, the receivers block all subsequent campaigns. Thus, there is a need for a way to enable multiple different senders each to manage multiple campaigns from a single mail gateway.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds