Space-efficient mail storing and archiving based on communication structure

The present invention relates to electronic mail. In particular, it relates to a method and system for processing electronic mail, wherein mails are stored in a space efficient way by removing redundancy from the content. Prior art is known for doing a limited version of this on a mail client. In order to provide a method and system which is adequate for server operation it is proposed to perform the steps of: splitting the content of an incoming e-mail into elementary mail segments by parsing and optionally normalizing the e-mail body based on a regular grammar with transduction rules; computing a unique ID for each elementary mail segment; storing the normalized or original form of an elementary mail segment together with a link to its respective parent elementary mail segment in a table in a way retrievable by said unique ID; and reconstructing an original e-mail from a concatenation of a respective sequence of said elementary mail segments wherein the unique ID for each elementary mail segment is used as a key for accessing said table and retrieving the respective elementary mail segment.