Email Address Inactivity Detection and Reply Suggestion

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Solution Overview

Problem

Users face difficulties in communicating with entities using inactive or unmonitored email addresses, as these addresses often result in bounced emails, making it hard to respond or seek support, and this leads to increased workload for email systems and network infrastructure.

Innovation Solution

An email messaging service that identifies inactive sender addresses and processes them against suggestion information based on monitored email replies to surface suggested reply addresses, allowing users to easily compose responses by replacing the inactive addresses.

Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles

VSEngineering Contradiction Analysis

1Reliability

If users attempt to reply to inactive or unmonitored email addresses, then they can initiate communication, but the emails bounce back and fail to deliver, wasting user time and increasing system workload

Engineering Contradiction:

Improveemail delivery reliabilityVSAvoiduser time lost in dealing with bounced emails

Core Design Contradiction:

ReliabilityVSLoss of time

Solution Approach 1:

The system proactively identifies inactive email addresses before users attempt to send emails to them. By monitoring email activity patterns and detecting when addresses become unmonitored, the system pre-computes alternative active email addresses and makes them available to users before the bounceback occurs, preventing time loss and failed delivery attempts

Inventive Principle:

Principle #10Preliminary action

Solution Approach 2:

The system acts as an intermediary between users and inactive email addresses by providing alternative active email addresses. When a user needs to contact an entity, the system mediates by suggesting verified active addresses from its database, rather than allowing direct communication attempts that would fail with inactive addresses

Inventive Principle:

Principle #24Intermediary (Mediator)

2Loss of information

If email systems process and handle bounced email reports, then they can identify delivery failures, but this increases system workload and network infrastructure burden

Engineering Contradiction:

Improvedelivery status informationVSAvoidemail system productivity

Core Design Contradiction:

Loss of informationVSProductivity

Solution Approach 1:

The system performs preliminary identification of inactive email addresses through continuous monitoring of email activity patterns. By detecting unmonitored addresses before they generate bouncebacks, the system prevents the formation of undeliverable email traffic, eliminating the need for subsequent bounceback processing and reducing system workload

Inventive Principle:

Principle #10Preliminary action

Solution Approach 2:

The system converts the potentially harmful effect of bounced emails into a benefit by using email activity monitoring data to proactively build a database of active email addresses. This transforms what would be wasteful bounceback traffic into useful information that improves overall email delivery success rates

Inventive Principle:

Principle #22Blessing in disguise (Convert harm into benefit)

Data Source

PatentUS10404643B2Undeliverable response handling in electronic mail systems

Publication Date: 2019.09.03 MICROSOFT TECHNOLOGY LICENSING LLC

AI summary

Systems, methods, apparatuses, and software for electronic mail systems and service in computing environments are provided herein. In one example, an electronic mail (email) messaging service is provided that identifies inbound email messages that include inactive sender addresses, processes the inactive sender addresses against suggestion information compiled based at least in part on monitored email replies related to the inactive sender addresses, and surfaces one or more suggested reply addresses for use in composing reply email messages in response to the inbound email messages.