Hawkyboy said:
Hi!
The above says it all really, as a recruiter pitching to new businesses
everyday it would be invaluable to note if an email had been deleted unread
by way of a receipt. This way the client could send out a subtle message to
the recruiter and this would enable us to work on other ways to win over the
client rather than assuming the email had been read and diregarded for other
reasons.
Do you even know how read receipts work in e-mail? Microsoft didn't
define this procedure so your suggestion is meaningless. Microsoft
can't do anything about the procedure.
When you request a read receipt, you add a header to your outbound
e-mail. Spam filters (server- or client-side) might remove that header
since it can be used by spammers to track valid e-mail accounts to then
prioritize further mailings to target that validated address (which
seems to be what you want to do, too - this is NOT a pro-spam
newsgroup!). When the recipient's e-mail client gets an e-mail with the
header, whether or not it will generate a new e-mail as the read receipt
depends on how the user configured their e-mail client. They may choose
to Prompt or Ignore those requests or Always send a read receipt (which
is a new e-mail sent back to the sender). The default is to Prompt;
however, usually upon the first or few of such prompts, the user
realizes that this is a privacy invasion in the sender attempting to
determine when the recipient has read the e-mail. So the user usually
configures their e-mail client to Ignore any such requests. That means
no sender adding that request header is going to get a read receipt. In
companies where is it policied to Always send a read receipt, that is
for internal use only (like a manager wants to know when their employees
have read an e-mail) yet their company's mail server will strip out the
header for any outbound e-mails that go outside the company's domain
(and also strip off that header when receiving an externally originated
e-mail). For example, and as I recall, Exchange will strip out the
header on any e-mails received from an external sender, strip out the
header for any e-mails sent out to an external recipient, but allow the
header for internally routed e-mails.
If the user is not using a Preview pane to open their e-mails, or the
Preview pane does not get updated simply because the user selects an
e-mail, the user could see from the Subject or From headers that it is
an e-mail that they don't want, like seeing your spam e-mails announcing
your recruiting service or that you are not a sender that they know. So
they could delete the e-mail without ever opening it. Read receipts are
generated by the e-mail client upon opening an e-mail, not because the
e-mail client got the message from the mail server. The e-mail must be
opened to determine how to act on that header. Alas, you'll find most
users will have already disabled read receipts in their e-mail client
(set to Ignore them) or their mail server or anti-spam program will
strip out that header. That you don't get a read receipt could be that
the recipient deleted your e-mail without ever having opened it (by rule
or by inspection), they configured their e-mail client to always ignore
the header in received e-mails, or their mail server or anti-spam
program got rid of it.
Unless you are in a domain where policies can be pushed to set the
e-mail client to Always send a read receipt (and which means their mail
server allows them for internally routed e-mails and not for external
e-mails), you don't get any control over how the recipient handles them.
Only boobs rely on read receipts to track who opened an e-mail or not.
Instead it is up to YOU to track your e-mails to see who has not replied
(via a normal e-mail, not via a read receipt) to determine whether or
not you follow up and when. There are add-ons that help in this
endeavor, like:
http://www.sperrysoftware.com/Outlook/Follow-Up-Reminder.asp
Do your own work. Don't expect your recipients to do it for you.
----------------
This post is a suggestion for Microsoft, and Microsoft responds to the
suggestions with the most votes. To vote for this suggestion, click the "I
Agree" button in the message pane. If you do not see the button, follow this
link to open the suggestion in the Microsoft Web-based Newsreader and then
click "I Agree" in the message pane.
http://www.microsoft.com/office/com...eac00bde3&dg=microsoft.public.outlook.general
When Microsoft gets around to dropping their NNTP server and their
webnews-for-boobs interface to Usenet to pretend they have these as
forums, we in Usenet won't be seeing this appended non-signature
"suggestion" garbage anymore. No one in Usenet can do anything about
Microsoft's code. No one has proven that Microsoft ever sees these
suggestions. Looks more like a means to placate complaining users with
a disconnected cross-walk button.
