--On Saturday, 15 December, 2007 02:30 -0500
Valdis(_dot_)Kletnieks(_at_)vt(_dot_)edu wrote:
...
No, I'm not.
In almost all the cases I've seen in 25 years, it's the person
who wants a delivery notification who was confused it - it's
almost *never* of actual interest merely if the mail was
*delivered*. What you *care* about is the *disposition* - if
it was sent to a human, was it *read*? If it was sent to a
daemon, was it *processed*?
...
Sure.
But the desire for read receipts / notifications runs squarely
into a privacy problem. A delivery notification is a product of
the transport environment, and such notifications, or their
absence, are generally reliable (at least in the absence of
mailing lists, where there may be a concern about disclosure of
list members and their addresses). But a significant number of
users view read receipts as an intrusion on privacy and have
them disabled or only selectively enabled, so that non-receipt
of a read receipt message gives one very little information in
the general case.
With both email and postal mail, delivery receipts/notifications
are about the best one can reasonably expect to get.
john