EPA PROCESS ORIGINS

Initial market research into eliminating unwanted e-mail("spam") revealed that the single gigantic barrier was NOT the problem itself but was - instead - the problem definition. If the problem is re-defined as retaining wanted mail, the solution becomes obvious.

One CAN'T exhaustively define what one DOESN'T want. One CAN define what one DOES want. If an e-mail user is allowed to specify criteria that defines what they want, the problem becomes one of applying the criteria correctly.

Moreover, since criteria state 'I want exactly this', there are only two mutually exclusive results that can arise from comparing criteria to test objects - It IS what's wanted OR It's NOT what's wanted.

Further market research was performed with the goal of defining an effective universal solution for classifying, controlling and managing e-mail. The research identified a number of other considerations which any proposed solution should addresse, including:

1. Multiplicity of e-mail server/client hardware and software operational environments.
2. Need to absolutely control ALL domain e-mail traffic.
3. Mailbox-specific classification criteria.
4. Open-ended post-classification processing
5. Multiplicity of domain owners and usage types.
6. Application to legacy e-mail systems.
7. User education required.
8. Solution replication and deployment.
9. Domain administration.

Investigation of an e-mail server's hardware and software environment identified two common processing points which exist in the e-mail Mail Transfer Agent('MTA')- or functional analog thereof - processing for all domain traffic. At these points, a fully-assembled e-mail has either just been received from the Internet for delivery or from an intranet/LAN e-mail client for transmission to the Internet or another LAN client.

Hence, ALL domain e-mail traffic and it's content is available to a server-side e-mail control process at this point. Here, filtering criteria can be applied to classify an e-mail and select subsequent processing before an arriving e-mail is permitted to enters the domain or before a departing e-mail is transmitted. Further, such a process has access to a wide range of subsequent actions which can be applied to the e-mail.

Hence, the basic mechanism that was originally intended to solve the unwanted e-mail problem was extended and refined to control and manage all domain traffic.