Subject: Delivery Status Notification (DSN) ?

From: [email-masked] (Vikas Agnihotri)
Date: 14 Apr 1997 16:42:13 EDT

Hello,
 Has some kind of standard been reached upon how MTAs are supposed to do
Delivery Status Notification (DSN)? I remember reading something about this a
few months back but didnt see any follow-ups on www.imc.org or anywhere else.

The 'Return-Receipt-To:' header works only with a small percentage of SMTP (or
otherwise) servers out there and thus is not at all reliable as a means for
finding out if your mail actually reached its intended destination.

There were a few proposals for standardizing on and implementing this out
there. What is going on with all this? Bottom-line: how can I *reliably* find
out if my mail has reached its destination?

Thanks,
Vikas

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From: [email-masked] (D. J. Bernstein)
Date: 14 Apr 1997 23:46:40 GMT

Vikas Agnihotri <[email-masked]> wrote:
> Bottom-line: how can I *reliably* find

If the recipient is willing to cooperate: Have him set up his local
delivery agent to generate return receipts for your messages. See, for
example, ftp://koobera.math.uic.edu/pub/docs/RFCNRUDT. Return-Receipt-To
is the most widely supported form of this solution.

If the recipient is not willing to cooperate: You're out of luck. There
is no reliable method. Note in particular that DSN reliably tells you
_something_, but the something is almost always ``Sorry, no receipt.''

---Dan
Let your users manage their own mailing lists. http://pobox.com/~djb/qmail.html

---

From: [email-masked] (Vikas Agnihotri)
Date: 15 Apr 1997 07:39:36 EDT

>delivery agent to generate return receipts for your messages. See, for

That is unrealistic. Do you seriously expect a person to get in touch with al
the potential recipients of Email and find out if their Email system supports
the Return-Receipt-To: header? Thats the whole point of a standard, right?
something that all (most ?) systems support implicitly, without anyone having
to take pains about it!

>is the most widely supported form of this solution.

Not in my experience. I would say that only about 50% or less mails I send out
come back with the Return-Receipt.

>_something_, but the something is almost always ``Sorry, no receipt.''

Well, wouldnt that suffice? If I get back some mail from the remote system,
even if it says 'No receipt', it is in response to my mail to that system so I
know that my mail has reached and that was my intent in the first place! Sort
of like  asking someone 'Are you asleep?' :). You get the point.

Do you know if the IMC or any other Internet standards body is working on
something to standardize on this isue so that one can reliably get a Receipt
to a email? 

As email is becoming a more mainstream form of communication, it
has to have these reliability features.

Regards,
Vikas

---

From: John R MacMillan <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 15 Apr 1997 18:25:46 -0700

|... Bottom-line: how can I *reliably* find
|out if my mail has reached its destination?

This may sound facetious, or too low-tech for many, but if you really
need to know, the _most_ reliable way is to ask the person to let you
know that they received the mail, by phone if you don't trust mail.

---

From: [email-masked] (Vikas Agnihotri)
Date: 15 Apr 1997 16:19:29 EDT

On Tue, 15 Apr 1997 14:16:27 GMT, Alan J. Flavell <[email-masked]> wrote:
>On 15 Apr 1997, Vikas Agnihotri wrote:

>> That is unrealistic.

>Of course it is.  Re-read the original question: it was unrealistic.  It
>asked for a reliable solution to something that cannot be done reliably
>on the Internet.  So why be so surprised when the answer also is
>unrealistic? 

Well, thats exactly what I set out to find. I am hearing that the current
state-of-the art of the Internet technology is such that this cannot be
reliably done. Fine. 

>> Thats the whole point of a standard, right?
>Oh, I wasn't aware that support for return-receipt was mandatory
>on the Internet.  Do you have a standards-track RFC that says it is?

Well, I wasnt aware of it either until I saw someone post otherwise in this
thread. See <[email-masked]>  I havent had time to check it out
yet.

Thanks and regards,
Vikas

Just out of curiosity, what is the percentage of mails that get arbitrarily
'dropped' without any notification at all to the sender? Due to whatever
reason? Has anyone ever done any studies/surveys on the "reliability" of email
as a form of communication as it stands today?

---

From: Robin S Socha <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 18 Apr 1997 15:30:08 +0200 (MET DST)

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

  >state-of-the art of the Internet technology is such that this cannot be

It might be a little off topic, but the safest way to make sure that a mail
has reached its destination is to use an auto-acknowledgement system. I've
set up procmail in a way that you can send a mail with "en/disable auto
acknowledgement" and that's that. All you need to do is make sure the other
side has the same, but as this measure is only necessary for a few people,
that's not a big deal, either.

There are some nifty reciped in the "procmail library" by Alan Stebbens:

http://reality.sgi.com/aks/depot/mail/procmail/procmail-lib.shar

HTH,
Robin

- -- 
Robin S. Socha, Political Science Dept., Bonn University, Bonn
To get my pgp public key, send an e-mail with the subject "get pgp key"
GMC d++ s+:+ a- C++ UL++$>+++$ P+>++$ E>+ W- N+ o@ w--- M-- PS--- PE+++ Y+
PGP++>+++ t+() 5-- tv++(+) b+++ DI++ D+(++) G++>+++ e++>+++ h r++>+++ y+**

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From: "Alan J. Flavell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 19 Apr 1997 18:23:11 GMT

On Wed, 16 Apr 1997, Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho wrote:

> The DSN RFCs do not standardize the Return-Receipt-To header.

I'm sorry, it was my mistake to use a form of words that suggested I was
referring specifically to the return-receipt-to header. 

What I had meant to say was, I wasn't aware that _any_ mechanism of mail
confirmation was mandatory, on the Internet.

Please accept my apologies for creating unintended confusion.