stacy said:
I have requested both delivery and read receipts when sending an email and
got back that the message was delivered but that the receipient did not send
the confirmation. Does this confirm to me that it was delivered? Did the
receipient have to physically not choose to confirm.
Delivery receipts are handled by the recipient's mail server. Few
bother sending acknowledgements to delivery receipt requests. They
already send out NDRs (non-delivery reports) as negative feedback. The
lack of negative feedback means (as far as they are concerned) that they
accepted the e-mail.
Read receipts are handles by the recipient's e-mail client. Not when
they receive the e-mail but only if they open the e-mail. And ONLY if
they choose to send the acknowledgement when prompted or have not
disabled that acknowledgement as an option in their e-mail client.
Delivery receipts are of little value. What do you care if the
recipient's e-mail service is up at the time your e-mail got to it? Few
mail servers waste their resources on delivery receipt requests. That
it got to the target mail server say nothing about it actually getting
into the recipients mailbox or down to their e-mail client.
Read receipts are of little value. Almost every user eventually wises
up after responding to the prompt a few times. They configure their
e-mail client to NEVER reply to read receipt requests. In corporations,
policy may dictate that read receipts must be acknowledged; however, the
default configuration in the Exchange mail server is to NOT send those
acknowledgements outside the corporate network (i.e., to outsiders).
If you want the recipient to acknowledge that they got your e-mail, just
ask them to reply saying such.
