Subject: return receipt question

From: Leslie Fairall <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 6 Aug 2000 18:26:55 -0400 (EDT)

Hello:

I turned on the return receipt feature in my custom headers, and I get
receipts from other people most of the time. However, I can't seem to
send a return receipt to others when I receive their messages. I thought
that you had to set up the return receipt option in sendmail. Can people
with linux boxes set the feature up? Please cc all responses.

***** **************************************************
"Contrary to popular belief, Unix is user friendly. It's just very
particular about who it makes friends with."
mailto:[email-masked]

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From: Ben Elliston <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 7 Aug 2000 08:59:17 +1000 (EST)

Hi Leslie,

   I turned on the return receipt feature in my custom headers, and I get
   receipts from other people most of the time. However, I can't seem to
   send a return receipt to others when I receive their messages. I
   thought that you had to set up the return receipt option in sendmail.
   Can people with linux boxes set the feature up? Please cc all
   responses.

There are two things at work here: mail user agents (MUAs) like pine, and
mail transport agents (MTAs) like sendmail.  Pine can request another MUA to
notify it of certain events like a remote user reading a message.  This is
handled by adding magic headers to the mail message that are not examined by
MTAs.  There is an emerging standard for this: the
"Disposition-Notification-To:" header.

Delivery service notifications (DSNs) are requested by the MUA of the MTA,
that negotiates them with other MTAs it talks to.  ESMTP has extensions to
negotiate this as the message is passed between MTAs.  This is how you can
get receipts that indicate that the message was written to the remote user's
mailbox, but nothing more.

I have some procmail tricks to tell me when users request read receipts with
their MUA and I have another little script to send one (by hand).  I pipe
their message through this script using Pine's "|" command to autogenerate
the receipt:

  #! /bin/sh
  (formail -rA"Precedence: junk" -A"X-Loop: [email-masked]" \
    -I"Subject: Read receipt" \
    -A"From: [email-masked] (Ben Elliston)" ;\
    echo "Your message to Ben Elliston has just been read.") | /usr/sbin/sendmail -oi -t

It would be nice to know what the plans are for Pine's support for receipts.
At the very least, it'd be great if Pine could flag messages which users
have requested receipts for.  I understand the general reluctance, though,
which is that these are often a problem in the presence of mailing lists,
etc.

Ben

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From: Walt Smith <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 25 Aug 2000 13:29:10 -0400 (EDT)

I think that sending of return receipts is strictly controlled by system
administration, not by Pine; that is, you can turn it on, but whether or
not you actually receive any is entirely up to the administrators of the
systems to which your mail is being sent.  BTW, please consider the total
waste of bandwidth that results from the sending of receipts ... don't
request a return receipt unless it's _truly_ critical.  Simply wanting to
know that Joe Blow got your mail isn't critical.

-- 
Walt Smith - Raleigh, NC
[email-masked]