Abstract: An email mapper to identify sender's U.S. postal address by detecting in the sender's email address, email message, or the sender's posting whether the sender's name and address are identifiable in the signature line of the sender's email and searching one or more electronic white pages to identify the sender's name and postal address. Wherein if no signature line is detected in the sender's email further filtering the sender's email to identify the geographic locale of the sender and then searching against one or more electronic datases, such as a business database, an ISP database, an electronic whitepage, or email mapper's generated relational database, to identify and generate a list of one or more USPS addresses associated with the sender's email address, name and locale of the sender.

Abstract: A method of conducting an on-line auction that permits individual bidders to pool bids during a bidding session. The auction is conducted over a computer network that includes a central computer, a number of remote computers, and communication lines connecting the remote computers to the central computer. A number of bidding groups are registered in the central computer, each bidding group having a total bid for the item being auctioned. Bids entered from the remote computers are received in the central computer, each bid including a bid amount and a bid designation. Each bid amount is contributed to the total bid of the bidding group indicated by the bid designation. The bidding group having the largest total bid at the end of the bidding session wins the item being auctioned.