Patexia seeks prior art for US Patents 8,161,104 (‘104), 8,468,198 (‘198), 7,707,624 (‘624), and 8,484,706 (‘706). The patents allegedly describe a method to provide a notification of delivery and/or opening of a message over the Internet to a participating user. The message is sent between an original sender and an original recipient via an intermediate server, which intercepts the message when it is first sent by the original sender.

Once the message arrives, the server makes several modifications to the message including:

• injecting a link that activates when it is in the original recipient’s inbox
• setting up a method to track the message’s transmission from the server to the original recipient and back to the server, including any servers the message might have accessed along the way
• associating a unique ID for the message and storing it at the server for later use
• associating a unique ID for the original sender and storing it at the server for later use

Once the message has arrived at the original recipient, Patexia is interested if one of two mutually exclusive options has occurred:

• the message sends a notification to the server immediately upon opening of the message
• or the message invites the original recipient to click on the injected link to send a reply to the original sender and receive a notification from the intermediate server

Once either of those options has occurred, the intermediate server receives the notification and/or reply from the original recipient and uses the unique IDs associated earlier with the message and the original sender to associate the notification/reply with the original thread. Using that association, the intermediate sender sends a notification to either the original sender or the original recipient based on the mutually exclusive option telling the user that the message has been accessed and the transmission path that the message took.

Figure 1. Overview of a notification of delivery and/or opening of a message