The disclosed system and method describe a ternary CAM device having, in addition to a data entry and a ternary mask entry, one or more additional control words which can specify a net mask length and status, a table identifier, andor a validity word to specify a detailed status of the segmented data words stored. The method can be used to \u201czero in\u201d on congested network periods by detecting differences in packet latencies among test packets. The mobile office platform is operative for providing only the n-most recent mail headers of electronic messages to the mail user agent. If the file backup software determines that the file modification policy has been violated, the file backup software generates an alert, indicating that the modification violates the modification policy.