A Method and System for Sharing Email Activities among Recipients

A Method and System for Sharing Email Activities among Recipients

A method and system is disclosed for sharing email related activity details of one or more recipients of an email message among the recipients of the email message in real-time. The email related activity may include, but not limited to, reading the email, replying to the email, and a completion status of the reply.

In an exemplary implementation, an email client is configured to work in conjunction

with an email server to retrieve real time updates pertaining to email related activities of one or more recipients of an email. The email client polls the email server passing an identifier for a list of emails displayed to a recipient . The identifier may be a subject of the email. Accordingly, the email server retrieves the list of relevant recipients and their current email related activities.

The email client displays an icon next to an email which a user (a recipient) may use to retrieve email related activities of one or more recipients of the email . For example, the user may double click on the icon next to the email and see a list of all "pending replies". The list of pending replies includes the list of recipients who are writing replies and draft status. Additionally, the user may also check if the reply

- is currently open and the focus within the other recipient's client
- is currently open but not the focus within the other recipient's client - is currently saved as a draft within the other recipient's client

Further, a user responding to an email also has an option of having their reply available in real-time as they compose the reply. This is available as a checkbox at the top of the email they are sending. If the user select "reply available in real-time", content of the draft of the pending email is posted to a service periodically . The service saves the pending email to a database (either a relational database or NSF or other storage system). The email client presents a button for "see pending reply" next to the responding user's name in the pending replies list. When pressed, the email client makes a call to the service and retrieves any pending replies from that user on that email. The server checks the credential of a user requesting the pending replies to the address list on the email before responding in case the user was removed from the reply. The client presents the list of pending replies or informs the user that the responding user chose not to make the reply available.

When any window is open showing a pending reply, the email client periodically polls the server to see if there is an update to pending replies since the time of the last refresh, and if so, the server responds with the updates to the pending replies for that email. In a web mail environment, the client may keep a persistent connection open

with the server instead of continually polling. In such an environment, an indicator can appear even in email summary views, like the in...