Apparatus and system for identifying and filtering emails based on content
View Patent ↗An apparatus and system are disclosed for regulating emails in an enterprise email system by marking, demarcating and referencing a content-context field in the header of the email. The content-context field designates the email as business or non-business in nature. Non-business emails are rejected, relayed elsewhere, or destroyed in response to positively identifying the email as non-business. The claimed invention prevents intermingling of non-business emails with business emails in business environments, and helps avoid potential liabilities that may result from associating business matters with personnel non-business matters.
1. A computer program product comprising a non-transitory storage device storing executable code executed by a processor to perform operations to regulate non-business emails at an email server such that non-business emails are not delivered to business email accounts, the operations of the computer program product comprising:
an operation to receive an email from a sender to a recipient;
an operation to examine an email header of the email;
an operation to read a content-context field in the email header, the content-context field comprising a standard header field defined by an Internet Assigned Numbers Authority and demarcated by the sender of the email according to a revised standard email protocol;
an operation to regulate delivery of the email to a business email account of the recipient as identified in a recipient field of the email header in response to the content-context field designating the email as a non-business email and the recipient not being granted rights to receive non-business emails by relaying the non-business email to a recipient-defined email address; and
an operation to deliver the email to the business email account of the recipient as identified in the recipient field of the email header in response to the content-context field designating the email as a business email else to deliver the email to the business email account of the recipient in response to the recipient being granted rights to receive non-business emails.
2. The computer program product of claim 1 , further comprising an operation to notify a user through a graphical user interface (GUI) of regulated handing of a non-business email.
3. The computer-program product of claim 1 , wherein the content-context field is a boolean field.
4. The computer program product of claim 1 , further comprising an operation to demarcate the content-context field as non-business in response to content of the email satisfying a non-business email criteria.
5. A system to regulate non-business emails at an email server such that non-business emails are not delivered to business email accounts, the system comprising:
a processor;
a data storage device for storing data;
an email from a sender to a recipient comprising a header and body;
a mail agent configured to store, transfer and deliver email messages, the mail agent comprising:
a receive module configured to receive the email;
an examination module configured to examine the email header;
a read module configured to read a content-context field in the email header, the content-context field comprising a standard header field defined by an Internet Assigned Numbers Authority and demarcated by the sender of the email according to a revised standard email protocol;
a regulation module configured to regulate delivery of the email to a business email account of the recipient as identified in a recipient field of the email header in response to the content-context field designating the email as a non-business email and the recipient not being granted rights to receive non-business emails by relaying the non-business email to a recipient defined email address; and
a delivery module configured to deliver the email to the business email account of the recipient as identified in the recipient field of the email header in response to the content-context field designating the email as a business email else to deliver the email to the business email account of the recipient in response to the recipient being granted rights to receive non-business emails.
6. The system of claim 5 , wherein the receive module is further configured to receive the email header exclusive of the body of the email.