Email receipt

D

David Morriss

Does anyone know if you can get a 'receipt' as confirmation that an email
has been delivered.
 
B

Barry Wainwright

Does anyone know if you can get a 'receipt' as confirmation that an email
has been delivered.
Click to expand...
You can insert the 'return receipt' header into the account settings:

Open the account for editing (Tools|Accounts; then select the account &
click on Edit)

Under the 'Options' tab, second item down is 'Additional Headers'. In the
'Header' column enter "Disposition-Notification-To" (without the quotes);
and in the 'value' column enter your email address.

DNRs will now be sent out with every message from this account, but not all
mail clients & mail servers support these protocols, so results from the
world at large may be variable.

If you have only an occasional need to do this on a message by message
basis,
duplicate your account and add the header to the new account only. Make sure
that this account is NOT included in any mail checking schedules, but that
mail from this account IS sent with every send. Now, to include the
return-receipt, simply change the account of a message to this ŒRR¹ account
with the pop-up menu that appears next to the 'from' header in a draft
message window when you have more than one account defined.
 
S

Sean Larkin

How are we to retrieve the receipt? I set up my account as you indicated,
and sent a test email to my earthlink account, which I then went online to
check. I viewed the header and did see the Dispostion-Notification-To
header listed. However, I have yet to receive any type of receipt.

Do I need to do something prior to sending the email? Is earthlink's web
mail one of those mail clients not supporting this protocol? Thanks.

-Sean
 
B

Barry Wainwright

There lies the fallibility of DNRs. You are dependent on the receiving mail
client handling the header in an appropriate way. A small percentage of mail
clients will actually doi anything with this header, and most of that small
percentage will ask the user if they want to send an acknowledgement.
Naturally, many users decline to do so.

You can set up Entourage to respond to a DNR header by using a mail rule.
Check for header 'disposition-notification-to' exists, then reply to the
mail with a canned text. Note that this will only respond to the sender of
the message, not the email address in the DNR header, if it is different. In
order to cater for this (admittedly, not common) problem, you would have to
have the mail rule fire an applescript that can parse the headers to
identify the address to send a response to.
 
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