charlieisleofwight wrote (on Fri, 12 Jun 2009 18:04:05 +0100):
Hi All,
Just wondering if anyone else has this same problem that Delivery
reports are not working but read requests are working.
MTIA
Chris
outlook 2003
xp pro sp3
Delivery reports are requested against the mail server for the
recipient. That is, mail servers send back an acknowledge for a
delivery report. Very few mail servers waste their time sending back
positive feedback that they got your e-mail. They send back negative
feedback if they cannot accept or deliver your e-mail. The lack of
negative feedback is the positive feedback. They don't need to waste
their resources sending back positive feedback.
Also, a delivery report can be used by spammers to validate their
mailing lists. Think about it. If they want to find out which e-mail
addresses on their list are valid, they just send them and find out
which ones get a successful delivery report. The receiving mail server
would send back an acknowledge which means the e-mail address was valid
there. E-mail providers are not interested in helping spammers.
Acknowlegements to read receipt requests are handled by the recipient's
e-mail client. They only get sent if the user answers Yes to a prompt
or configures their e-mail client to always send them. More often the
user will get annoyed by the prompt and realize that they are not
interested in allowing the sender to know their activities, so they
configure their e-mail client to always ignore the read receipt
requests.
Extremely few mail servers are going to waste resources sending back
positive feedback when they already send negative feedback (the lack of
which is the positive feedback). Users often disable acknowledging the
read receipt requests. If you want better results in knowing if
recipients are getting your e-mails, ask them to reply. They dislike
sneaky senders.
