Read Receipts Questions

[useless]

I've got the DeliveryReceiptTo email address setup and DispositionNotificationTo email address setup, but not getting any read receipts. I appreciate it says in the docs some email servers do not support this, but I have not been able to find an email server or email client ie Outlook this works with. What email servers do these two facilities work with? Customer also wants to get the read receipts from Outlook, OE and other email programs is this something which NT and or File Explorer can do/supports? If so any pointers to where in the docs I can find this. If not any web resources that point to the specs the read receipts work to if known? I've got this one http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_receipt already and following up on the links but also googling to see what other info exists so I can build this into the email program.

[Bruce]

>> but not getting any read receipts.

In the early days of the mail protocol these seemed like a good idea, but then spammers used them to determine the validity of addresses. Since then they've pretty much become defunct as people either turned the functionality off on purpose, or it became turned off by default.

In short, as a feature, it's now completely useless because so few programs support it (and so few people have it on) that it really tells you nothing. It's a common request by clients ("but _we're_ not spamming...") but there simply isn't a way to reliably get receipts. (If one considers that somewhere upwards of 96% of all mail is spam, and hence the primary goal of most email systems is to _not deliver_ 96% of emails, it's not terribly surprising that features like this get dropped.) This is one of those cases where you simply can't give the client what he wants (and if you get _really_ clever to try, then your mail _really_ looks like spam and will likely not get delivered.)

the primary alternative to receipts was to use a small 1 pixel graphic in the body of the email, with a unique url parameter, and then feed that back through a web server, but that's basically regarded as spam now, and most email readers won't fetch graphics as a result.


>> Customer also wants to get the read receipts from Outlook, OE and other email programs is this something which NT and or File Explorer can do/supports?

A receipt is just an email. So it's nothing special that nettalk has to do. (It's got nothing to do with File Explorer). If the receipt makes it back to your mailbox then nettalk can read it.

Cheers
Bruce