smtp and how to get read msg. confirm.

[mati]

Hi

I've written simple library that sends e-mail using smtp protocol.
Everything works fine but I don't know how to get confirmation of reading
sent messages. I've read RFC docs about SMTP and MIME and couldn't find
anything about how to do this. I know that I can't force user to send me
this confirmation, usually e-mail client apps show message telling that
sender wishes to know if the message was read, so sending this request has
to be a part of some protocol. My question is - is this a part of smtp prot.
or maybe some other. Maybe someone could give an example what to send to
server and when..

thanks

Marcin

[Dan Mitchell]

Post by mati
I've written simple library that sends e-mail using smtp protocol.
Everything works fine but I don't know how to get confirmation of
reading sent messages.

You can't. SMTP gets the mail to the server at the other end, and that's
all it can do.

There's no guaranteed way to do this, because you don't know what mail
client people are using; Outlook can do it when talking to an Exchange
server, because there it's using Exchange's protocols.

Your only hope for anything cross-platform is to use web bug images, but
a:those are bad manners because they're breaching people's privacy, and
b:are blocked by most mail clients/webmail readers these days for exactly
this sort of reason.

-- dan