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Grex > Coop8 > #135: Mail return receipts. Does anyone care about them? | |
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| Author |
Message |
mdw
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Mail return receipts. Does anyone care about them?
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Oct 31 05:40 UTC 1996 |
I disabled return receipts as part of the process of coming back up.
Return receipts generate extra mail, and since we were already drowning
in mail, it seemed to me that these were one item of mail we could
definitely do without.
So far as I know, the only "useful" function return receipts "have" is
that when a user in India sends mail from an invalid "from" address, we
(staff on grex) get to find out when his return receipt bounces. We've
never been successful in convincing the people who run mail systems in
India that this is not a nice thing, so I am inclined to think that
return receipts are one of those "useless" things that nobody really
uses.
Accordingly, it seems to me that we should just leave them off.
In a *future* version of sendmail, I hope that we will have somewhat
more control over return receipts. We might be able to (for instance)
reject return receipts from microsoft mail products while leaving them
enabled for other things.
Does anybody actually *use* or *like* the poor little things? Can anyone
think of any good reason not to leave them disabled?
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| 12 responses total. |
tsty
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response 1 of 12:
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Oct 31 09:31 UTC 1996 |
what does a 'return receipt' look like .. the header stuff?
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tsty
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response 2 of 12:
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Oct 31 09:36 UTC 1996 |
oh, and thank you very much for the new hd install.
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davel
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response 3 of 12:
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Oct 31 15:15 UTC 1996 |
I've occasionally used the things when I'd sent mail which seemed to require
an answer but didn't generate one, in the hopes of seeing that it was indeed
being delivered. (Bounces take longer & sometimes I've failed to get one when
the mail did *not* get through.) But this seems like a low-priority feature.
TS, you put in a header of a form something like:
Return-receipt-requested-to: tsty@cyberspace.org ... or maybe
Return-Receipt-To: tsty@cyberspace.org
Since this is not an officially-recognized standard header (or wasn't
a few years ago, when I was reading a newsgroup where this and
related questions were FAQs), I may not have something "right" (and
there isn't exactly a "right" version, I think. Marcus can probably
say what exactly he disabled.) But in any case, you're dependent
on someone's machine's bothering with such headers, & there's no
guarantee that it will. And since a lot of people posting answers
to such questions viewed the mere existence of such things as one
big invasion of privacy - what right do *you* have to ask questions
about a user on *my* machine? - not to mention an imposition on
the system receiving the header, there's not likely to be any standard
*requiring* that such headers be honored, any time soon.
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davel
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response 4 of 12:
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Oct 31 15:24 UTC 1996 |
(The second of those formats I gave worked on a machine I just tested it on;
the first did not. Just for what it's worth.)
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kerouac
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response 5 of 12:
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Oct 31 18:05 UTC 1996 |
#0...good idea. Who needs return receipts anyway.
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adbarr
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response 6 of 12:
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Nov 1 12:00 UTC 1996 |
This may be one of those items scrambled by the time-lag from the disk
problems for me. FWIW - the USPS is planning on providing "certified" email
in the near future. I hope that is relevant.
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steve
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response 7 of 12:
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Nov 2 00:29 UTC 1996 |
Not relevant in this context, but it is interesting.
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tsty
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response 8 of 12:
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Nov 3 08:22 UTC 1996 |
lots of ppl coming into unix from um's mts system found out just
how spoiled rotten they were witht he way the $message system worked.
maybve the return-receipt idea tries to recapture some of that.
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albaugh
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response 9 of 12:
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Nov 3 11:37 UTC 1996 |
If I trust that grex & foreign sites are going to reliably bounce
undeliverable mail, and therefore can trust that anything not bounced *was*
delivered, then I wouldn't need return receipts. It's only when I have
doubts...
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davel
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response 10 of 12:
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Nov 3 21:46 UTC 1996 |
(The system generating the return-receipt message and the system generating
the bounce in case of undeliverable mail are often, maybe usually, going to
be different. Just FWIW.)
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tsty
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response 11 of 12:
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Nov 8 09:23 UTC 1996 |
thankxx davel, several ppl appreciate the header description.
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arthurp
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response 12 of 12:
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Nov 17 21:53 UTC 1996 |
I made a mess with them once. I say having axed them, bury them in the junk
heap.
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