Subject: Re: Confirmation of succesful delivery

From: Paul O Bartlett <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 6 Nov 1996 20:18:58 -0500

On 6 Nov 1996, Christopher Gordon wrote on comp.mail.pine:

> Can anyone tell me how to get pine to request a message confirming the 
> succesful delivery of a message I have sent. It would also be nice if it
> was possible to  get confirmation of a sent message being read. I know
> both these features are available for Pegasus mail in dos.

    OK.  First, Pegasus mail is a proprietary system which might or
might not conform to Internet standards.  Just because Pegasus does it
does not mean you can do it anywhere on the Internet.  And as a matter
of fact, there are no Internet standards (so far as I know) regarding
return receipts.  It's rather much a crapshoot.

    More specifically, there simply is no Internet-wide way to get 
confirmation back that a recipient has read a particular piece of mail. 
Sorry, but you're just out of luck on that one.

    Sometimes is is possible to get a return receipt back indicating
that a particular piece of mail was placed in a recipient's mailbox,
and nothing more.  Go into your Pine configuration and add the
customized header

        Return-Receipt-To: your_email-address

Sometimes you will get a receipt back and sometimes you won't.  It
all depends on whether the receiving system honors your request, 
and nothing says it has to.  For now that's the best you can do.

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:  http://www.access.digex.net/~pobart

---

From: Hans Schleichert <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 13 Nov 1996 16:55:31 +0100

The Return-Receipt-To: header works fine, given the receiving system
supports returning receipts. I have a question connected with this header.
When I move to cursor into the To:, Cc:, Bcc:, etc. header lines, a menu
choice of ^T - Go to addressbook is offered. This is not so for the
Return-Receipt-To: line. Since I don't want to jam email systems with
receipts, I only add my address to this header line in cases when I REALLY
want a receipt. I'd like to add just the nickname which I defined for
myself, but obviously this cannot be done w/o the ^T To addrbook option.
Or can it?

Thanks,
    -  Hans