System and Method of responding to emails back to originating website.

System and Method of responding to emails back to originating website .

This article describes a system that allows a transparent communication overlay of an email/IM system with web 2.0 systems.

Sending an email.
1. User creates an email. Either a new email or as a response to an existing email. This can be done in an email client or from a link from a website, for example a blog.
2. Before sending they can flag the mail that they want to route the response to a wiki/blog entry.
3. The system determines if the email contains an email response/forward from another user. If it does it queries the SMTP X-Headers to see if the users have allowed their email to be used in such a manner (the default is that it is not allowed). If the header does not exist then the client can fall back to requesting approval by email to the other users or have it automatically deny.
4. The system can also be defined by the administrator to block the functionality under certain conditions. For example but not limited to:
- Email or response flagged as confidential.
- Allowed/blocked websites to post to.
- Users blocked
- Keywords/phrases contained in the emails.
- If one wants to put a delay on the sending to a blog/wiki/etc. This can be defined by the number of responses in the mail thread.
- If one wants responses on that thread to be allowed to be posted.
- If notifications should be sent back to the user if a response is posted via another user.

The user can also set these but cannot override the administration policy.
5. Once approved the system adds SMTP X-Headers to emails to define the expected behaviour based on the previously selected settings.

Alternate sending of email to reference Blog directly.

1. User A creates a new mail message that he would like to expose publically, but also invite responses from certain specific individuals. He creates his e-mail as normal, but instead of clicking send, he clicks the "Send to Blog" button. The mail client interprets the selection of "Send to Blog" in the following way:
2. Using pre-configured details of the user's blog (e.g. location, login ID) stored in the e-mail client, the full body of the e-mail is uploaded as a new blog entry.
3. Individual e-mail invites are sent to everyone listed in the e-mail address fields, containing a link to the article and a request for respondents to use the "Reply to Blog" option.

Receiving and responding to email.
1. User receives an email. The mail is visually marked in a way that the user can see that response settings are configured. They can check to get exact details.
2. User clicks respond or forward to it. If the system does not support the functionality then the mail client works as normal. However the X-headers are passed on in the response.
3. The user sends the email. If the flags are set then the use...