Dr Paresh said:
I have selected read receipt and delivery receipt. In tracking options
both
are clicked. But i do not get delivery receipts. I get only read
receipts. I
am using Microsoft Outlook 2003 (standard edition). Iused to get it
earlier
but suddenly it has stopped working. Can somebody diagnose and help
me with
this.
Thank you
Some mail servers support delivery receipts (and respond to them). Most
don't. The fact that the sender does NOT get an non-delivery report
saying that delivery failed is often considered sufficient that your
message got delivered (i.e., no bad news is good news). Sending back a
report message for a delivery receipt request just makes extra work for
the receiving mail server when the lack of a negative response is enough
to know that the receiving mail server accepted your message.
The delivery receipt only tells the sender that the message got received
by the mail server. That means that there is a mailbox on that server
which has been assigned the username to which you sent. That can be
used by spammers to validate e-mail addresses. They can use a name
generator to create a huge list of possible usernames, sent a test
e-mail, and get back positive responses to identify which accounts
actually exists. Then they will slam hard those valid usernames.
You can send the request for a delivery receipt but don't expect it to
work too often. You can send a request for a read receipt but the
recipient gets the same choices as you in configuring their e-mail
client, and they may choose not to reply. After all, it is an invasion
of their privacy for you to know that they read your e-mail without the
option to deny telling you that they read it. That would be like
putting radio transmitters inside the binding of every book to let the
authorities know when you decided to open and read a book.
In a work environment where the company can establish policies regarding
the use of its properties, they can demand that their employees enable
replying to read receipts. It would be simple enough for a manager to
test that an employee enabled this option by sending an e-mail and
waiting for the read reciept.
