Subject: Re: confirm reading in elm or pine

From: Paul O Bartlett <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 17 Jun 1996 11:09:41 -0400

On Mon, 17 Jun 1996, Marcel Vehof wrote:

> Do Elm or Pine have a confirm reading option, like
> Pegasus Mail?

    This is the Pine newsgroup, and I cannot speak about Elm.  Do you
mean, is there a way to get some confirmation back that the recipient
has actually opened and read the mail?  No.  There are no Internet-
wide standards for this sort of thing.  Some proprietary mail systems
(may like Pegasus Mail? which I am unfamiliar with) may do it, but that
works only among users hooked together and using that same proprietary
mail system.  Internet-wide you're out of luck.  Sorry.

Paul                             <[email-masked]>
----------------------------------------------------------
Paul O. Bartlett, P.O. Box 857, Vienna, VA 22183-0857, USA
Finger, keyserver, or WWW for PGP 2.6.2 public key 
Home Page:  URL: http://www.access.digex.net/~pobart

---

From: [email-masked] (Claus Assmann)
Date: 17 Jun 1996 19:05:19 +0200

>Do Elm or Pine have a confirm reading option, like

elm doesn't have this. There is ongoing work about a standard for this.
 
Here are two URLs which might be of interest:
http://www.ietf.cnri.reston.va.us/html.charters/receipt-charter.html
ftp://ds.internic.net/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-receipt-mdn-01.txt
Maybe someone implements this in elm or pine when it is an RFC?

Regards,

Claus Assmann
-- 
If it stinks, it's chemistry. If it moves, it's biology.
If it does not work, it's computer science.
		--- Alessandro Forghieri <[email-masked]>
<URL:http://www.informatik.uni-kiel.de/%7Eca/>

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From: [email-masked]
Date: 19 Jun 1996 15:38:19 GMT

>  mail system.  Internet-wide you're out of luck.  Sorry.

Well, it doesn't *only* work between the users of the same system.  The 
version of (Win) Pegasus Mail that I first used only had a "confirm reading"
option, which would insert a "X-pmrqc: 1" header, recognizable by Pegasus
mail only, AFAIK. The next version also included a "confirm delivery" option
which inserted the well-known "Return-Receipt-To:" header.  Using this option
with users of various mail systems, some with SMTP gateways (cc:mail, MS-Mail,
etc), some without, produced widely varying results. Well, varying from 0-2
confirmations per message.  Sometimes I got a delivery confirmation from the
receiving MDA, indicating only that it was received. I might also get a receipt
when they actually *read* the message.  Sometimes I got nothing.  To confirm that
they actually *read* the message, the MUA needs to support that function, where,
as you implied - you can't count on anything.   Especially for SLIP-based mail
readers.  Doesn't Eudora Pro send a receipt when the msg is fetched from the POP3
server and not when/if the msg is actually read?  I can't remember. And the
shareware Eudora doesn't support (sending) read receipts at all.

Steve "oh, wait - this is the PINE group" Patlan
(speaking for myself, blah, blah, blah)

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From: Don Sugarman <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 21 Jun 1996 07:39:04 -0400 (EDT)

deja vu - 

There was a long thread a couple of years ago on pine-info about
message confirmation, including which MUAs support (e.g., cc:Mail),
limited MDA support (i.e., system - not recipient - receipts), the pros
and cons (privacy issue), and do-it-yourself receipt scripts.

One thing that got little argument was that putting a request in the
message asking the recipient to acknowledge receipt by sending a reply
message will work with all MUAa and MDAs - but not with all recipients.

Don Sugarman
[email-masked]