If you (the defendant) has found good prior art (either by this method or some other method), you can also file for a re-examination with the USPTO using that new prior art. Still somewhat expensive, but significantly less expensive than going to court, and if the patent is found invalid it is just as dead.
Or is the re examination all that much rigorous and accurate?
Am I bad for thinking of such things? ;)
Now think a second about the useful things emails are used for which text messages generally can't be: notifications for new releases of OSS projects or replies to a blog comment, mailing lists for OSS developers or hobbies...
Many -- if not most -- of the patents that the community is quick to decry as "obviously ridiculous" only appear so if you misunderstand how patents work. [1]
The US Patent Office has granted millions of patents and reviewed millions more applications in the fairly brief life of computer/systems/process patents. The few dozen legitimately bad patents hardly justify an accusation of sloppiness.
We would all be positively blessed if every bureaucratic system had such a low failure rate.
That all said: Yes, the system obviously needs work. But the performance of patent examiners isn't that primary a concern to anyone who's taken a good look at the system and it's problems.
[1] All that matters are the claims. The descriptions are irrelevant to the meat of what, specifically was being patented. The community has a long history of loudly complaining about descriptions that define an absurdly general invention, when the claims, in fact, indicate a narrowly defined patent of at least arguable value.
That sounds wildly optimistic.
I'm not counting any undesirable patents that are causing problems because patent terms are too long, or those that were granted because patent law/precedent/policy didn't give the examiner any cause to reject it, etc.
My point is only to refute the charge that examiners 'sloppiness' is common and/or a notable problem.
http://www.space-travel.com/reports/Boeing_Patent_Shuts_Down...
And I am pretty sure, even ignoring broadness as a factor and just sticking to patents granted despite prior art, that if there were only a few dozen patents causing trouble then the companies like Article One, who is getting patents revoked in the hundreds due to discovery of prior art, would not be able to exist while paying out millions in discovery fees to their researchers.
[edit] - a look at the problem of workload by a USPTO Patent Examiner;
And most claims are thrown out of consideration simply because most patents only include a few independent claims. And as a practical matter if you can rule out infringement of an independent claim you've ruled out any possibility of infringement of its dependent claims.