AxisMobile claim to have secured a broad reaching patent in the US for its Mobile Email service. The patent protects AxisMobile's Email Optimizer.

The Optimizer enables subscribers to use their handheld's embedded email client software and gain access to previously unsupported mailboxes and attachments. It further minimises the load time of large data by converting the content of emails for mobile handset device formats and sizes thereby significantly reducing the email size.

AxisMobile has a global, blue chip client base and over 3.5 million users of its services.  The Company's objective is to provide software that drives the mass market adoption of mobile email and related products by making multimedia information portable, ubiquitous and easy to access on subscribers' existing mobile handsets at an attractive cost.

The patent awarded, serial number 7,039,678, is titled email proxy and discloses
a system and method for providing email messages to a user in a more efficient
manner.  Specifically, the system and method of the invention enables
attachments to be downloaded separately from the text-element of the email
message, which requires less bandwidth to download.  Instead, these attachments
are downloaded separately in a streamed manner.