[ Note: I am well aware that this issue is mainly one for mail user
agents, and not mail transports such as exim. Still, this seems a forum
populated by knowledgeable mail admins, and maybe someone can point me in
the right direction. ]
While the RFCs don't allow for this AFAIK, it would be very nice in some
installations to have an email system that could confirm that/when the
message was read by the recipient. The mechanics seem simple, but getting
a standard that all clients will honour seems beyond current reality.
A client recently discovered that the Pegasus Windows Email client
(v3.01b) includes a check-box for "Confirm Reading". If you check this,
Pegasus prepends the header
X-Confirm-Reading-to: yourname@???
to the mail; supposedly, other clients that can understand this header
will respond appropriately. Right now that seems to limit this
functionality to others using Pegasus.
In my experience Pine and Elm, as well as the email clients in both IE and
Netscape Communicator, neither create nor honour this header. The old Unix
business suite Uniplex had this functionality, but all sides needed to be
running the Uniplex mail client. Does anyone know of other mail clients
that support this (or any similar) mechanism? Is there any kind of a
standard in lieu of an RFC-blessed header?
As for exim relevance, is there *anything* being discussed at a high level
about regarding a receipt-confirmation mechanism -- this one *could* be
implemented at the MTA level if enough systems agreed on the format of
the header.
Thanks.
- Evan
--
*** Exim information can be found at
http://www.exim.org/ ***
