As it is generally known, electronic mail (also referred to as “e-mail” or “email”) is a store-and-forward method of writing, sending, receiving and saving messages over electronic communication systems. Examples of e-mail include the Internet e-mail system based on the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), and systems based on other protocols, including intranet systems allowing users to share messages in support of workgroup collaboration.
When a user sends an e-mail message, it is often desirable for the message to be sent as a reply to a previously received message. For example, it may be desirable to send a message as a reply to a message previously received from a specific user, or received within a specific message thread. Reply messages may be advantageous, for example, because they may automatically include relevant text and or other content from a previous message, thus providing recipients with context and history from the e-mail conversation to which a new message belongs. However, in existing systems, in order to send a specific reply message, the sender may have to manually perform a search within his or her e-mail In-box and/or other message folders to locate a most recent message he or she has received from a specific person, or within a specific thread. If a sender has a large number of e-mail messages in their In-box and/or other message folders, or the original message to which they wish to reply is so old that it is difficult to locate, the sender may simply give up, disregard the original thread and send a new message without the context of the original thread.
Maintaining message threads has become increasingly important as more and more e-mail clients provide the ability to keep messages together in a conversation or threaded view. Messages sent outside of the appropriate thread become disconnected and harder to organize with the relevant original content. Despite recent improvements in automatically organizing received messages within threads, it is still often difficult to use existing systems to maintain threads when sending new messages without manual effort to search through old e-mail messages.
For the above reasons and others, it would be desirable to have a new solution that allows users to conveniently send reply messages even when they have large numbers of received e-mail messages in their In-box, and/or when a relevant previously received e-mail message to which they wish to reply is relatively old.