Importance

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Abstract

A way of synchronizing the contents of commonly-owned mailboxes (108, 111) in disparate messaging systems, such as an e-mail system (100) and a multimedia system (101), networked via the Internet (102). The e-mail system uses the existing auto-forwarding feature (115) of the Internet e-mail community to send a copy of every message arriving at the e-mail mailbox to the other system's synchronized mailbox. The other system applies a 3-part synchronization rule (113) to every message (200) arriving at its synchronized mailbox. If it detects a syncmark (204)--an identifier--of its own mailbox in the header (201) of the message, indicating that the message was previously copy-forwarded from this system, it just deletes the message. If it detects a syncmark or a pivot address of (any address resulting in message delivery to) the e-mail mailbox in any header field of the message other than the 'From' field, indicating that the message is a new message copy-forwarded by the e-mail system, it stores the message in the synchronized mailbox but does not copy-forward it back to the e-mail mailbox. Any other message is a new message and is both stored in the synchronized mailbox and copy-forwarded, with the syncmark of the synchronized mailbox, to the e-mail mailbox. State changes of messages stored in each synchronized mailbox are detected and reported to the other synchronized mailbox, where like state changes are effected on corresponding messages.

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