Appeal No. 2000-2245
Application No. 08/661,686
what action, e.g., delete, is to be taken because Gross neither discloses nor suggests
that the trusted recipient is “one of a plurality of trusted recipients,” as claimed.
Additionally, since there is no more than a single possible trusted recipient
disclosed by Gross, and that single trusted recipient must have the e-mail presented in
order to decide whether it is to be deleted, there can be no “automatically preventing
presentation of said e-mail message to one or more of said plurality of trusted recipients,”
as required by each of the independent claims 1, 12, 23 and 31. This language cannot
apply to the single possible trusted recipient in Gross because the single recipient must
read the message before deciding to delete it. Thus, this single trusted recipient would not
have been prevented from receiving the e-mail message and, since there are no others
authorized to read the e-mail and decide what action to take in Gross, because there is no
teaching of a “plurality of trusted recipients” in Gross, then a “presentation prevention
mechanism configured to prevent presentation of an e-mail message to one or more of a
plurality of trusted recipients,” as set forth in claim 23, cannot be met by Gross.
Connections is no help in providing for the deficiencies of Gross since Connections
is merely an article describing the necessity of establishing policies by companies for
providing guidelines regarding e-mail content in order to avoid legal liability. There is
nothing therein that would provide a suggestion to the artisan to
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