Method and apparatus for billing a fee to a party initiating an electronic mail communication when the party is not on an authorization list associated with the party to whom the communication is directed

摘要

A method and apparatus for determining whether a party sending an email communication is on a list of parties authorized by the intended receiving party. If the sending party is not on the list of authorized parties, a fee is charged to the sending party in return for the message being provided to the intended receiving party, or if the sending party has not authorized such fees to be charged, the message is simply discarded. Preferably, the present invention is implemented with Internet communications. However, the present invention can be used in private networks as well, such as local area networks (LANs) and wide area networks (WANs). Preferably, the present invention is implemented at the intended receiving party's ISP. In accordance with the well known Transmission Control Protocol/internet Protocol (TCP/IP), the destination address of the intended receiving party and the source address the sending party are contained in the IP message, commonly referred to as a datagram. When a datagram is received at the ISP, the ISP server analyzes the destination address and the source address to determine whether the source address is on a list of authorized source addresses associated with the destination address.