Invalidity dossier
US 5937162
Method and apparatus for high volume e-mail delivery
Current assignee: Google LLC
Added 9/23/2026, 6:19:56 PM
Active provider: DeepSeek · deepseek-flash
Patent summary
Title, assignee, inventors, filing/issue dates, abstract, and a plain-language overview of the claims.
Patent Overview — US 5,937,162
Title: Method and apparatus for high volume e-mail delivery
Patent number: US 5,937,162 (application US08/710,964)
Assignee / inventorship: Inventors listed are John T. Funk, Curtis C. Generous, Bryan Costales, and Daniel Casson. Original assignee is Exactis.com, Inc. The source also shows later recorded assignments ending with Google LLC as current assignee; those transfers are noted only as they appear in the supplied text.
Key dates: Priority date 1995-04-06 (claimed from US08/431,254); filing date 1996-09-24; publication/grant date 1999-08-10. Legal status shown as "Expired - Fee Related," with anticipated expiration 2015-04-06.
Purpose: The patent addresses the problem that conventional e-mail transmission used a single sending program on a single first-in-first-out queue, which is slow and underutilizes network bandwidth for high-volume sites. It aims to control e-mail delivery to many destination hosts and to enable automated generation and distribution of large volumes of unique e-mail messages, while also easing the burden of handling bounced messages.
Plain-language scope (from the excerpt):
- A method of routing outgoing e-mail messages to one of multiple e-mail queues, routing messages with common destinations to the same queue, and delivering each queue to a designated destination host.
- A method of tracking messages by inserting a code into a first e-mail message, sending it, receiving a modified version containing the code, and matching the received message to the original based on that code.
- A method of forming an electronic mailing by entering subscriber records specifying timing, content, and formatting information, then assembling and transmitting each mailing per subscriber.
- Corresponding systems for these processes.
Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/US5937162/en
What the excerpt does not establish: It does not provide the full claims, detailed embodiments, or the omitted description text (including FIGS. 1–8 details). It does not establish litigation, validity, enforceability, or the accuracy of assignment records.
Generated 10/1/2026, 9:42:49 PM
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Litigation summary
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PTAB challenges
AIA trial proceedings at the USPTO Patent Trial and Appeal Board — IPR, PGR, and CBM. Petitioners, judge panels, claim-level invalidation outcomes from Final Written Decisions, and Federal Circuit appeals. The single most important defensive datapoint after litigation history.
Assignment history
Inventors, original assignee, and the chain of ownership recorded with the USPTO — including the correspondent attorney who recorded each assignment, since shell-LLC chains often share one repeat-player attorney even when the entity names look unrelated. Surfaces NPE / patent-troll patterns: shell-entity transfers, known asserters in the chain, repeat correspondent fingerprints, pre-litigation assignments, and bankruptcy fire-sales.
Prior art
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Obviousness
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Extensions
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Derivative works
Defensive disclosure: derivative variations of each claim designed to render future incremental improvements obvious or non-novel.