[MlMt] Receipts for received mail.

[Bill Cole]

On 10 Jun 2019, at 13:25, Jack Saturn wrote:

> Hello all,
>
> I run a small business which is heavily dependent on email to 
> communicate with my clients, and over the past year, I’ve discovered 
> more and more of my messages being flagged as spam, especially by 
> Gmail. These are single messages being sent — not bulk mail 
> — and it happens seemingly at random. (It’s not the fault of 
> Mailmate, I know that much.)
>
> In some threads on this list from years past I found mention of an 
> experimental “mail-receipt” / return receipt / MDN feature where I 
> can configure my outgoing messages so that I’ll get an automated 
> reply when the recipient opens my message. I dug around but haven’t 
> been able to find instructions on how to configure this feature. Any 
> help would be appreciated!

One way, implementing RFC3461 support (mail transport/delivery 
receipts): 
https://updates.mailmate-app.com/release_notes#experimentalsupportforrequestingdsns

Another way, implementing RFC8098 support (mail client receipts,) would 
be to add "Disposition-Notification-To" to the composer headers, is at 
https://manual.mailmate-app.com/hidden_preferences#composing. Some mail 
clients support the older (and never formally specified) 
"Return-Receipt-To" header, so you could also add that to the composer 
headers. Both of these would require you to manually enter your address 
when you want to request a receipt.

HOWEVER: you should be aware of the fact that all such mechanisms have 
an inherent security flaw: they depend on receiving systems following 
the commands of arbitrary senders of mail who are not authenticated in 
any way to those receiving systems.  As a result, many mail systems and 
many mail clients do not support them by default or have restrictions on 
which requests for receipts will be honored. Also, most mail clients do 
not send receipts automatically and many (like MM) ignore requests for 
them entirely. Therefore, you cannot rely on the lack of a receipt 
meaning anything at all.


-- 
Bill Cole
bill at scconsult.com or billcole at apache.org
(AKA @grumpybozo and many *@billmail.scconsult.com addresses)
Not Currently Available For Hire