Appeal No. 2002-1755
Application No. 09/173,286
The examiner applies Figure 7.3, at page 539 of Microsoft
Office, to claim 1 as follows: An e-mail message is shown wherein
the message is addressed to a recipient and forwarded to another
user with an original message. This, the examiner says, is the
claimed “receiving from an originating user information for a
recipient, at least one contributing user, and a first sub-
message.”
The examiner identifies the “Message marked as forwarded”
and “Send” as the claimed “contacting said at least one
contributing user.”
The examiner contends that the mail forwarding system of
Microsoft Office, whereby a second message can be received, is
equivalent to the claimed “receiving a second sub-message from at
least one contributing user.”
Since Microsoft Office discloses the combining of sub-
messages into a single message, by “Your comments” and “Original
message,” the examiner says that this is the claimed “composing
said message using said first and second sub-messages.”
The examiner points to the “Reply” button and the “Reply
All” button of Microsoft Office, the activation of which creates
a new message from a received message, the new message sent back
to the recipient, or sent to all the contributing e-mail users,
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