Enhancement of e-mail client user interfaces and e-mail message formats

Abstract

An enhancement to e-mail user interfaces and message formats includes a dynamic preview window to view and retrieve attachments and summaries of e-mail messages directly in the e-mail list view or inbox view without opening an e-mail message. The efficient viewing mechanism further allows previews without cluttering the listing of the e-mails in the inbox by allowing the client to detect special preview instructions within an e-mail and run executables within the preview window. The enhancement is applicable to standalone e-mail clients (POP or IMAP based) and to web-based e-mail systems.

Description

CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS [0001] This application claims the benefit of U.S. Provisional Application No. 60 / 688,174, filed Jun. 7, 2005.BACKGROUND [0002] The present invention relates generally to the enhancement of e-mail user interfaces and message formats, and more specifically to providing a dynamic preview window for viewing summaries of e-mail messages and attachments without having to open the e-mail message [0003] E-mail is a very heavily used computer application program, and the number and size of e-mails are increasing every day. Recipients frequently must spend hours reading and responding to emails. Much of the increase in size is due to e-mail attachments. Because it is relatively easy to do, senders may add pictures, documents, and even video attachments to e-mails. E-mail recipients are frequently forced to guess the content of an e-mail from the subject line, and they are only notified of the present an attachment by a “paper clip” icon or the like. Th...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0007] The invention affords a method and system for enhancing a user interface of e-mail clients to allow efficient preview of an e-mail in a list of e-mails. The invention enables users to preview the content associated with an e-mail on an inbox view listing of e-mails without opening the e-mail. The preview may be in a temporary preview window that appears only during activation by the user for a particular e-mail, and, therefore, does not require a constant dedicated display space on the e-mail listing. When deactivated, the preview window may disappear.

Problems solved by technology

This requires invoking another application for each different type of attachment, and is very time consuming.

Unfortunately, this reading pane suffers from several shortcomings.

Firstly, it is a separate window that takes up a large amount of space on the display screen, which limits the amount of space available to list e-mails in the inbox view listing 111 of e-mails.

Secondly, the reading pane is an operational mode of the Outlook e-mail application that is either turned on or off.

Auto-preview also does not allow access to attachments.

However, they also suffer from the drawback that these preview windows take up a large amount of space on the screen, and still require the e-mail and an appropriate application to be opened to access an attachment.

Images