US Patent 7761516 System and method for e-mail presence confirmation

A telecommunications system includes a plurality of electronic messaging clients (122); at least one messaging server (104) having an e-mail presence activation module (114) adapted to receive an e-mail and determine therefrom whether a presence of a recipient is to be determined, and a presence module (215) responsive to controls from the e-mail presence activation module and adapted to determine a presence of a recipient of said e-mail prior to sending the e-mail to the recipient. In one embodiment, the e-mail presence activation module (114) is adapted to read a priority level of the e-mail message to determine whether to check a presence of the recipient.