Subject: Re: Return Receipt et al

From: Michael Rowe <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 2 Mar 1993 10:37:16 +0000 (GMT)

Why not use the following

Generate-Delivery-Report:

This can be used to request a delivery report when sending mail from
Internet through an X400 gateway, and is mentioned in the latest RFC
relating to Internet to X400 gateways/message transfer.

Michael ([email-masked])

PS. I can't remember the RFC number I think it could be RFC 1123,
I'm not sure. It only has a passing mention in an otherwise large
document. It is also refered to in earlier RFC's on the subject.

---

From: "Steven D. Majewski" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 2 Mar 1993 10:36:56 -0500

On Mar 2,  0:04, Laurence Lundblade wrote:
> ... I think a lot of the need for verification now is because 
> users are new and insecure about e-mail. 

I agree with that point. And another reason is the partial penetration
of email in some organizations. Some people use it. Some don't. 
( And a place like UVA gives everyone an email address whether they 
use it or not. ) Some people don't know how to use the mail 
software. ( And especially, don't know how to turn on notification
if it hasn't been turned on by default for them. ) People don't 
understand why some messages bounce back right away, and others
take several days to be returned. In this sort of environment 
every bit of feedback helps --- It's like when a program echo's 
back "Working..." or something to keep the impatient from hitting
the interrupt. People like to get that "So far, so good" message!

> I think the ironic thing about the current r-r-r: is that it's probability of
> working is about the same as the message going through so it doesn't get
> you very much... 
> I think the gating issue for Pine is clearly the lack of standards for
> this. The idea in Pine is to stick with standards to keep interoperability
> and quality as high as possible. 

I guess what I was trying to say before was: 
I agree, in their current form, receipts are any ungly kludge, and so 
I can understand if you don't want to waste your time on them, BUT we 
ARE going to need those sort of standards soon. 

> There was a mailing list where some
> Internet standards folks were hashing some of this out, but I think the
> effort sort of petered out, mostly due to technical difficulties making it
> work across gateways. 

Which again, leads me back to the need for an "Email Architecture 
Reference Model". i.e. I don't see a proposal out there that tells 
the gateway and application people what exactly they are expected
to support. ( unless maybe it is implicit in some future promise 
of X.400 interoperability. ) 

But anyway - since the question is no longer "Why doesn't PINE 
support r-r-r?", I'll be happy to move this discussion to another
list if you have a suggestion of which is the appropriate one. 

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