> On Wed, 23 Sep 1998, Evan Leibovitch wrote:
>
> > 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.
>
> My own personal belief that the best protocol for learning
> whether your message has been read is putting the magic letters RSVP at
> the bottom of it. This gives you some assurance that the message has got
> into the recipient's brain and not just been displayed on a screen.
> However, despite my belief,
That doesn't work at all well when the problem is between the
keyboard and the chair.
> ...
> However, I got totally bogged down in trying to understand how to use
> the DSN data correctly. Sending a message when a delivery fails or is
> delayed is easy - Exim does that already. All the other cases are
> conceptually difficult. How does Exim know when a delivery is a "final"
> delivery? The most difficult thing of all is the area of aliasing and
> forwarding. The RFCs are full of weasel words and I concluded that it
> just wasn't clear enough to attempt anything further. Others have agreed
> with this position.
I haven't read the RFCs; but it seems like it would be possible to
add a generic transport boolean that would indicate that this transport
is expected or believed to constitute the final delivery. The default
should probably be 'false'; but it could be argued that delivery to a
file should default to 'true'. (Or am I misunderstanding the scope of
the problem?)
> ...
> Personally, I *hate* it when I get an automatic response saying "Your
> message has reached my inbox. I'll get to it as soon as I can." It's
> just so much noise.
Yep, these are annoying. Which is why delivery notices should only
be issued if the sender requested them. I occasionally need to
correspond with people who don't check their e-mail often and/or
are -very- bad about replying or acknowleging messages. And who
occasionally deny ever having received a message. MDNs would help
my peace of mind when dealing with these folks.
-Pat
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