[MlMt] Read receipt?

[Bill Cole]

On 29 Oct 2018, at 13:05, Filip Stokkeland wrote:

> Hi!
> It seems Mailmate honors/sends read-receipts?

It does not seem so to me. I expect Benny would have let us know if he 
added that, as it has been a topic of discussion here. MM does support 
requesting "read-receipts" (a.k.a. "MDNs") as a hidden experimental 
feature, but not generating them.

I have just tested this with a message sent via TBird with both standard 
forms of request for a "read-receipt" (Disposition-Notification-To and 
Return-Receipt-To) to 2 accounts that I use MailMate with on 2 different 
mail servers that I manage, and opening the received messages generated 
no "read-receipt" messages sent from the client Mac and nothing received 
on the sending account to indicate that the messages had been read.

> (I sent a test message to myself from a webmail, then when I had read 
> it in Mailmate, a popup notification in my web browser told me my 
> email was read.)
> I assume this is the same "request read receipt" or what it was called 
> that one could set in Outlook etc?
>
> I assume it can be turned off?

It is NOT a standard form of "read-receipt" being sent as a message by 
MailMate, which has never supported such a feature. The 3 possibilities 
for what's happening that I can think of are:

1. Your IMAP server is generating a MDN when the \Seen flag is set by 
MM. There's no way MM could disable this without disabling its tracking 
of read/unread messages. Your IMAP provider should offer a way to 
disable it if this is what they are doing.

2. The sending account and the receiving account are both handled by the 
same mail-hosting platform (e.g. Office365, GMail, etc.) which supports 
message status notifications between hosted accounts. This is a variant 
of (1) and so it isn't something MM can disable, although the mail 
hoster should allow it to be disabled. If your accounts are in a domain 
handled through a business account for O365 or Google Apps or similar 
services, the ability to disable this may be held by your domain admin 
and set as a matter of policy.

3. You have MM configured to retrieve external images in HTML mail, and 
the webmail system you use is inserting a 'bug' image (traditionally a 
transparent 1x1 GIF with a unique name that IDs the message.) In this 
case, when MM retrieves the image, it effectively notifies the sending 
system that the message has been rendered, and so (presumably) read. 
This sort of 'bugging' of email is why the "Image Blocking" feature of 
MM exists, and why grumpy old sysadmins like me recommend applying it to 
the All Messages folder.

-- 
Bill Cole
bill at scconsult.com or billcole at apache.org
(AKA @grumpybozo and many *@billmail.scconsult.com addresses)
Available For Hire: https://linkedin.com/in/billcole