🚀 go-pugleaf

sdorner@qualcomm.com (Steve Dorner) writes:

>I think it is high time that some form of standard return receipt were
>available in Internet mail.  It's one of the few functional areas where the
>Internet lags behind practically ever proprietary mail system, and X.400 to
>boot.

>My initial leaning is to enshrine "Return-Receipt-To:" as a standard for
>successful delivery, since it has some utility and is also not going to go
>away anytime soon (rampant fantasies of sendmail haters aside :-)).  But I
>would also suggest a "Read-Receipt-To:", to be generated by the MUA (and
>ONLY the MUA) when the message is actually read.
>--
>Steve Dorner, Qualcomm, Inc.

   I would tend to agree with your leaning, but several SMTP compatible
mail packages already implement "Return-Receipt-To:" as a read
receipt (Control Data's ASCENT*Mail is one of these and is widely
used in the U.S. Air Force).  I had the pleasure of hacking "elm"
to recognize and implement this header for an Air Force customer
who demanded this capability and desired compatibility with
existing systems.

  My recommendation on this subject however, would not be to
try to formalize the "Return-Receipt-To:" header (or create
a Read-Receipt-Header), but instead to attempt to take advantages
of MIME, which is now gaining rapid popularity.  By using MIME's
content type/subtype classifications similar to "message/external-body",
one could implement read receipts at the MUA level as you suggested,
but probably with much greater ease.  A good example of how
this could be done is the MIME compliant messages sent out by
the IETF announcing new/proposed RFC's.  When these messages are
read with a MIME compliant reader, the user is given the opportunity
to automatically send a request to a mail server.

  Although metamail's "showexternal" script is not ideally suited
to read receipts, perhaps a new MIME subcontent type definition
(and accompanying metamail script for MIME readers using metamail) i
would allow the easiest and most elegant implementation of read receipts.

--
Kevin M. Hanrahan            hanrahan@wpsp01.hq.aflc.af.mil
C.E.T.A. Corporation
Beavercreek, OH              (513) 427-CETA