Apple has joined Google, Dell, and Yahoo! in the list of companies being sued by InNova. The company claims they, along with 32 other companies, have been using their spam filtering technology without permission for an unspecified amount of years.

InNova claims the patent was granted to mathematician Robert Uomini in 1995. Unomini is credited as the founder in the lawsuit while InNova takes credit as the patent licensing company he went through. The technology is called “System for Adding to Electronic Mail Messages Information Obtained from Sources External to the Electronic Mail Transport Process” but few details have been given about how it actually works, other than the very vague “helps determine what emails are spam and which are legit”. However that hasn’t stopped the company from declaring that if it weren’t for them, the entire email system would fall apart.

          “More than 80 percent of email is spam, which is why companies use InNova’s invention rather than forcing employees to wade through billions of useless emails. Unfortunately, the defendants appear to be profiting from this invention without any consideration for InNova’s legal patent rights,” said patent-infringement attorney Christopher Banys.

The suit lists everyone from Bank of America to Frito-Lay, Dr. Pepper and RIM. It’s not yet known why InNova and Uomini waited so long to sue or why they chose the companies they did. The suit was filed in the U.S. District Court of East Texas. Texas has long been known as extremely friendly to those filing patent suits.

None of the companies named in the suit have yet commented.