At the risk of boiling this over, to be honest I don't believe Mail.app is a 
very competent email client.  It's really Outlook Express for the Mac.  Once 
upon a time Apple may have cared--signs of Eudora were written all over it--but 
they don't now; for them, the metaphor of email is shattered by the slightest 
hint of advanced functionality.  I pity them, and us.

This is as much of a source of frustration to me as anyone, because I don't 
believe we have an alternative--Thunderbird doesn't work yet, for example.  At 
best, you can use a command-line or console client such as Heirloom mailx or 
mutt/alpine.

I have already filed bugs against specific aspects of Mail.app's protocol 
implementation, many of which were regressions from previous versions.  At best 
they have been marked as duplicate, but no further action on them has been 
taken.  I conclude that Mail.app really isn't an ideal email client for my 
needs.  It works in most cases, but you do have to squint pretty hard to 
overlook the ugliness.

As I said, the solution that you've outlined can work, but it won't work for 
people who have multiple accounts, and is IMO too clunky to be workable in 
day-to-day use.  If you find differently, by all means, use it and more power 
to you.  DSN (delivery receipt) is off the cards, because you absolutely 
require control over the SMTP dialog; you can't just use headers.  This is a 
great shame, since DSN is more ubiquitous even than read receipts; for example, 
iCloud supports it, even though you can't access it.  If the SMTP server you 
are sending through happens to be Sendmail, and a non-default option is set, 
then Sendmail will honour the obsolete "Return-Receipt-To" header, but many 
sites simply don't know the meaning of that header at all, so you will get 
unpredictable behaviour.

If I wanted to solve this problem more permanently, I'd use some sort of 
hand-written SMTP proxy server that made a set of changes to all mail that I 
sent out.  Maybe one day I'll do it, but right now I'm insufficiently 
motivated; it's easier just to start up Thunderbird in Windows.

Cheers,
Sabahattin

-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups 
"MacVisionaries" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email 
to [email protected].
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

Reply via email to