Thought I just would send out a general reminder to all of you, since there lately has been a tendency of numerous users overlooking this part of good listing activity. In most cases, I do believe it is due to people not knowing the consequences of their activity, but in some cases it could be due to badly configured individual computers.
Numerous times, we get messages on the different mailinglists of GW, where the sender is requesting a receipt of reading. This is known to be a lack of good listing behavior, although I doubt that this is the underlaying idea of any of the users. But you may want to pay attention to a couple of facts, when you are requesting such receipts. doing so, may even result in you getting more response on your actual query, on the list. First of all, sending a query to a mailing list - that may even hold several thousands of subscribers - and asking for a receipt-of-reading, has no real benefit to you. If only a fraction of the subscribers send you their receipt, you are loaded with hundreds of messages, only telling that the query of yours, has been displayed on the other computer. It does not even denote in any way, to what extent the other user even bothered to read your message - only telling the message showed up on his computer for a second. Really, of what benefit is all of this to you? Such overloading of the mailing systems, creating a ton of "useless" messages, is a well-known method of spam and malware attacks. The more sofisticated Email servers, might even have filters that blocks your messages. Since the receipt you receive, does hold no guarantee that the recipient really bothered to read your original message, there generally exists little real benefit in this kind of requests, on any mail you send. In a few cases, where messages between you and another user is of extremely high importance, it may be the practice to request a receipt. But those cases are so rare, that the general user would be much better off, in manually requesting the receipt for the individual message. As such, you should configure your mailing software, NEVER to request receipt-of-reading automatically. The requesting of receipt, is also a well-known method of spammers. Sometimes to ensure their message reach really-existing addresses. Other times, it is a way for their servers to collect Email addresses, that later on can be used for whatever activity their malware operations may want. Therefore, subscribers of the mailing lists, who happen to have an active spam filter installed, will never get your message. this due to the spamfilter simply deleting any messages that requests a receipt. The consequence is, that your message will not be read, and you will have no assistance of your issue. Even subscribers who have no spamfilter installed, may be precautious, in dealing with any messages that requests receipts - either manually, or automatically deleting any such messages. Again, you may loose the opportunity of receiving any helpful feedback. And, lastly, some users may simply ignore any messages that holds such a request - simply out of principal ideas, that they consider your request of such nonsense and non-serious characteristics, that they don't bother to leave you any answer - even if they have the fix for your query. No matter what would be the case, YOU are the only one that really looses out, when requesting receipt-of-reading. You cause a load of unnecessary and useless trafic, frustrates numerous other subscribers, and end up with less benefit than you were aware of. Don't you agree, it would be far better to turn off that requesting of yours? Don't you think, we all would benefit the more from postings that holds no suspicious requests? Let's all try, to keep the lists of the community as clean as posible.
