Anybody can protect an invention. The average 8K-18K in average lawyers fees is trivial. Building a team and acquiring the necessary funding to launch a business investment based upon an invention is a far greater challenge. Not everybody is at a stage where quitting their job to work on such things full time to build a product complete enough to present to angle investors is a viable option. If it were so simple then every software developer would be a successful start up founder.
That's what I find so perplexing about this patent in particular – email is only useful due to interoperability, so patenting the underlying representation of an email is a non-starter for general purpose use.
I really hope you don't have general purpose use in mind, I'm guessing you're hoping it's more for something along the lines of EDI applications between governments, or something else. I just don't get what it's for.
At risk of going blue in the face, where is the value in this patent that I'm not seeing?
