Importance

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Abstract

Electronic mail client software has a mailbox displayer which lists messages together with an icon for each message where the icon is associated with the MIME type of the message. Mail which contains a file attachment is listed in the inbox with an icon indicative of the type of file attached to the email. The mailbox displayer interprets the MIME type and selects the appropriate icon either from the icon registry in the OS or from a directory of icons maintained by the email client software. The mailbox displayer component preferably includes all of the functionality of state-of-the-art mailbox displayers and includes the functionality of looking to a directory of icons for display with information about the message based on the MIME type and subtype of the message. If there is no appropriate icon in the directory of icons, the mailbox displayer uses icon image data contained in a subpart of the MIME message if it is available. Otherwise, no icon or a generic icon is used. According to the presently preferred embodiment, a type table is maintained by a type updater component. The type table includes a list of message types and subtypes together with filenames of scalable icons to be used by the mailbox displayer.

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First Claim