Postini antispam patent could cause headaches

IDG News Service - A patent granted to managed e-mail security company Postini Inc. in the U.S. could pose problems for the company's competitors and others in the managed e-mail services market, experts warned.
If enforced, the patent, which covers an e-mail "preprocessing service," could give Postini Inc. control over the use of a wide range of antispam and e-mail security methods. However, some industry experts expressed doubt that the patent, filed in September 2000, will stand up to legal scrutiny.
Patent No. 6,650,890 was awarded to Postini by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office last November. The patent cites three inventors, including Postini co-founder and Vice President Scott Petry and former employee Gordon Irlam. The patent describes a variety of methods for providing messaging services in an e-mail network, according to the Patent and Trademark Office's Web site.
Among other things, it covers the use of an "intermediate pre-processing service [in] the electronic message delivery path" that requires changing the "Domain Name Server entry ... of the destination email server to contain an IP address of the intermediate pre-processing service."
Different methods of message preprocessing are addressed in the patent, including forwarding based on instructions stored in user profiles, forwarding parts of the e-mail message content, forwarding e-mail to wireless devices, junk e-mail filtering and virus detection.
Companies such as Postini, MessageLabs Inc., MX Logic Inc. and FrontBridge Technologies Inc. intercept inbound e-mail on behalf of customers, then filter out spam, viruses and other unwanted messages before sending the remaining messages to the customers' e-mail servers and the messages' intended recipients.
The new U.S. patent declares such configurations to be Postini's intellectual property, said Steve Frank, a partner in the patent and intellectual property group of law firm Testa Hurwitz & Thibeault LLP in Boston. "To the extent that [Postini's] competition is running preprocessing centers that intercept e-mail and does something to it, this patent has fairly broad coverage," Frank said.
Postini executives are studying the patent and considering ways to "maximize" its value to the company. In the meantime, customers and potential customers should have more confidence that the company's technology is built on a solid legal footing, said Shinya Akamine, president and CEO of Postini.
However, legal experts said Postini's patent has telltale signs of weakness and may not stand up to legal challenges.
The patent cites only other patents in the crucial "References" section, which is used to establish the originality of the patented technology compared with prior inventions, also known as "prior art."
The lack of nonpatent sources of