Invalidity dossier
US 6836792
Techniques for providing add-on services for an email system
Current assignee: Trend Micro Inc
Added 9/21/2026, 9:31:35 AM
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 6836792 B1
Title: "Techniques for providing add-on services for an email system"
Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/US6836792/en
Bibliographic data (as supplied): Application US09/454,469; inventor Samuel Chen; original assignee and current assignee (per the listing, which disclaims legal analysis) Trend Micro Inc.; filing/priority date 1999-12-03; publication/grant date 2004-12-28; status listed as Expired – Lifetime, with anticipated expiration 2019-12-03. The source also records a 2000-03-06 assignment from Chen to Trend Micro Incorporated and a 2004-11-08 priority link to US10/984,480 (US7401122B2).
Purpose: The patent concerns systems and methods for providing add-on services to emails transferred over a distributed computer network — specifically, delivering add-on services in response to emails received at an email system while requiring little change to the email system itself. The stated motivation is user demand for more sophisticated features (redirection to other domains, auto-reply, voice/facsimile delivery, anti-spamming, virus scanning) and the difficulty of integrating new features into existing legacy email systems, particularly where the operator leases code from a third-party developer and may lack source-code access.
Plain-language scope: Emails travel from a sender front end across the Internet to an SMTP server at the recipient's email system, which stores messages in a database facility; the recipient later retrieves them via a web server, with an HTML or protocol converter formatting the message for display. The excerpt describes an add-on arrangement in which a module (illustrated by an advertisement insertion module interfacing with the HTML converter facility) inserts content into the email before it reaches the recipient — established prior art in this excerpt as a revenue model.
What the excerpt does not establish: No claim language is reproduced, so the precise claimed scope is unverified. It provides no complete description of how add-on services are registered, invoked, or billed; no full embodiment details; no figures; no discussion of validity, enforceability, litigation, or prior art beyond the advertisement example. Legal status and assignee listings are expressly stated in the source as assumptions, not legal conclusions.
Generated 10/1/2026, 10:02:15 PM
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Litigation summary
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Proceedings on file (0)
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No PTAB proceedings on file. This patent has not been challenged via IPR, PGR, or CBM. The absence is itself a signal — well-asserted patents eventually attract IPRs. The LLM analysis below may surface filings the ODP feed hasn’t indexed yet.
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
Combinations of prior art that suggest the claimed invention would have been obvious under 35 U.S.C. § 103.
Extensions
Patent term adjustments, term extensions, continuations, divisionals, family members, and expiration dates.
Derivative works
Defensive disclosure: derivative variations of each claim designed to render future incremental improvements obvious or non-novel.