--On Saturday, 15 December, 2007 02:30 -0500
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>...
> No, I'm not.
>
> In almost all the cases I've seen in 25 years, it's the person
> who wants a delivery notification who was confused it - it's
> almost *never* of actual interest merely if the mail was
> *delivered*. What you *care* about is the *disposition* - if
> it was sent to a human, was it *read*? If it was sent to a
> daemon, was it *processed*?
>...
Sure.
But the desire for read receipts / notifications runs squarely
into a privacy problem. A delivery notification is a product of
the transport environment, and such notifications, or their
absence, are generally reliable (at least in the absence of
mailing lists, where there may be a concern about disclosure of
list members and their addresses). But a significant number of
users view read receipts as an intrusion on privacy and have
them disabled or only selectively enabled, so that non-receipt
of a read receipt message gives one very little information in
the general case.
With both email and postal mail, delivery receipts/notifications
are about the best one can reasonably expect to get.
john
