Subject: has mail been read?

From: [email-masked] (Laurie Fuchs)
Date: 8 Oct 1996 03:22:46 GMT

Is there anyway to know whether or not mail I have sent has been read or
not? Thanks to anyone that has any information.

--

Laurie

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From: Paul O Bartlett <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 8 Oct 1996 07:54:42 -0400

> not? Thanks to anyone that has any information.

    In general, NO.  There are some proprietary mail systems which will
do this, but there simply is no way to do it across the Internet.  I'm
afraid 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

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From: Clifford Wesley Fulford <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 9 Oct 1996 10:31:45 +0100 (BST)

There are two customised headers that can be added to a message which
might help Laurie. 

Return-Receipt-To: name@domain

This is not guaranteed to work but I find that most mail delivery agents
either recognise it and send confirmation of delivery or do not
recognise it and send a message saying its delivered the item but
it didn't know what to do with this header (which ends being the same
from the senders point of view). 

The other one

Read-Receipt-To: whoever@someplace

which I guess is closer to what Laurie wants, is dependent on the mail
user agent being used by the recipient to read the mail. At best (or worst
depending on how you feel about this kind of stuff) if the user agent
recognises the header it will confirm that the message has been opened for
reading. Simeon for instance will do this. Pine wont. 

Read receipts can be a very contentious issue though and you will need to
take into account that some people are very much opposed to them in
principle.

Clifford Wesley Fulford
_________________________________________________________________________
CBF-International   |  [email-masked]            | 044 (0)468-003-889
17 Sewdley Street   |  [email-masked] | 044 (0)181-986-5239
Lea Bridge, E5-0AX. |                               | 044 (0)171-577-2741
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On Tue, 8 Oct 1996, Paul O Bartlett wrote:

> Finger, keyserver, or WWW for PGP 2.6..2 public key

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From: [email-masked] (R. Stewart Ellis)
Date: 10 Oct 1996 21:28:23 GMT

Paul O Bartlett <[email-masked]> writes:

 >On 10 Oct 1996, Juergen Sauer wrote:

 >: Paul O Bartlett <[email-masked]> schrieb
 >: am Tue, 8 Oct 1996 07:54:42 -0400 in comp.mail.pine:
 >: POB> On 8 Oct 1996, Laurie Fuchs wrote:
 >: 
 >: > Is there anyway to know whether or not mail I have sent has been read or
 >: > not? Thanks to anyone that has any information.
 >: 
 >: POB>     In general, NO.  There are some proprietary mail systems which will
 >: POB> do this, but there simply is no way to do it across the Internet.  I'm
 >: POB> afraid you're out of luck.  Sorry.
 >: 
 >: Incorrect.
 >: 	finger user@domain 
 >: 	will do the job. That's what finger is for.

 >    First, 'finger' is not a general solution, because it does not
 >exist on many systems.  Second, many users have set their account up so

Finger is included even on many PC TCP/IP stacks, plus it is on every UNIX I
have seen, and on most VMS stacks.  In a window environment it frequently
has to be run from a shell window.

 >that others cannot finger their account.  Third, and most importantly,

How does a user setup their account so that people cannot finger her?  

 >I have never seen any output whatever from 'finger' that told me
 >whether or not somebody had read or even received a piece of mail from
 >me or anybody else.  I confess I am baffled as to why you think
 >'finger' will provide the information Laurie Fuchs is looking for.

finger on Solaris 2.x of [email-masked]  provides the following info:

Login name: ellis                       In real life: R. Stewart Ellis
Directory: /faculty/ellis               Shell: /bin/csh
On since Oct  8 07:32:02 on pts/1 from GMI_Modem_Pool
Mail last read Thu Oct 10 16:56:36 1996
Project: I cannot talk or ntalk. Please email me.
Plan:
               TEN THINGS THAT WOULD BE DIFFERENT IF MICROSOFT

                            STARTED BUILDING CARS

1. A particular model year of car wouldn't be available until after that
   year instead of before it.
...

Note the "Mail last read Thu Oct 10 16:56:36 1996", which is about as good
as the info gets, but it does allow a user to infer that I have not checked
my mailbox in about 30 minutes, even though the xterm with pine in it is
always open in the bottom right corner of my display.  If the user sent the
mail yesterday they would be within their rights to assume I was ignoring
their mail and could mail me enquiring if I got it, which might make me feel
guilty enough to respond.

-- 
  R.Stewart(Stew) Ellis, Assoc.Prof., (Off)810-762-9765   ___________________
  Humanities & Social Science,  GMI Eng.& Mgmt.Inst. ()  /   _____  ______
  Flint, MI 48504    Free speech and free software!  /\ /        / /  /  / /
  Web admin:  http://www.gmi.edu/      [email-masked]   /________/ /  /  / /

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From: Paul O Bartlett <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Oct 1996 19:22:15 -0400

> How does a user setup their account so that people cannot finger her?  

    I have never tried this, because I want people to be able to finger
my account, but according to the user manual from my service provider:

        cd $HOME
        touch .nofinger
        chmod 711 .
        chmod 755 .nofinger

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From: Stan Kalisch III <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Oct 1996 23:28:18 -0700

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----

[I'd set followups to somewhere else, but I'm not exactly sure where this
belongs--um...comp.protocols ?...]

> my account, but according to the user manual from my service provider:

Do note that (I forget which implementation of "finger" I know of that
does indeed support what you've described) only certain implementations of
"finger" support this--and I'm not sure that most even support it at that.

Stan

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From: "J. Tse" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 9 Oct 1996 02:07:56 GMT

> not? Thanks to anyone that has any information.

  I don't think it's possible.
  If you want to know whether your e-mail has reached the recipient's
server, try the header "Reply-To:".
  If what you suggest is possible, isn't it an invasion of privacy? ;)

J. Tse