acknowledgement of receipt of email
Judith.Tx
person receiving the email acknowledge receiving it? I previously had
Earthlink and there was a way to do this. The person received the
email but it had a message in a box in front of the email which the
person had to click on to acknowledge receiving the message before the
box went away and the email could be read. This can be very important
so whomever you email can't tell you later that he never received your
email - whether it is a business matter or a family member who is bad
about not answering!
Judith.Tx
J Rudick
group you'll find both people who like and dislike this idea.
Nonetheless, you should offer your suggestion to Gmail at:
https://mail.google.com/support/bin/request.py?contact_type=suggest
Also, I believe that some email clients (e.g., Outlook, Thunderbird,
or Apple Mail) offer message receipts. These might work with Gmail
via POP access to your account.
Zack (Doc)
them (I'll admit I'm one who dislikes them 90% of the time), have a
good reason to oppose them; they don't work like you'd want them to.
They can only be effective within the same domain (GMail to GMail,
Earthlink to Earthlink, CompanyA to CompanyA). Once you cross a
domain (GMail to Earthlink, CompanyA to CompanyB) there are a hundred
different ways it could break. If a feature doesn't work universally,
I say there's no point in having it, cause then it'll cause annoyance
(and troublecalls) when it doesn't work. Being a professional
troubleshooter, I HATE when people call me with troubles that are
simply a fact of life, cause a) they hate to hear that, and b) they
want ME to make it actually work. No "one" can fix the fact that Read
Receipts (as they're professionally known) break across domains. For
it to become universally effective, EVERY domain owner would have to
agree on a) how it will be done, and b) to do it. There are too many
mini-domains that could/would not join this cooperation, so the only
way would be to enforce it on everyone through standards, and there
are still people who violate that.
Another reason I dislike them in a personal environment is their use
for "evil". If Read Receipts work, so do, necessarily, Delivery
Receipts. A Delivery Receipt simply shows the sender that it was
received, not necessarily read. Delivery Receipts could easily be
exploited by spammers to validate their entire database of millions of
e-mail addresses. Bye-bye random address searching programs that
shoot millions of e-mails out to addresses that aren't real, and hello
greater floods of spam to your personal mailbox since the spammer
KNOWS it's been delivered. And virus writers would have a field day
with it as well, since the very receipt could be the method of
delivery.