How can I determine if a recipient has actually seen the message?
How can the sender know that the message was not automatically deleted or sent to spam or otherwise filtered. The recipient actually had a chance to read the message? They may have manually deleted it before reading it just after noticing the name of the sender, let us say, but at least it was presented.
I'm sending messages to a recipient and getting absolutely no response. This is a person who would definitely respond unless they were somehow imprisoned.
mike marian mmarian@sonic.net
All Replies (4)
You can ask for a Return Receipt (under Options in Write), but the recipient doesn't have to respond if he doesn't want to.
Merry-Widow said
You can ask for a Return Receipt (under Options in Write), but the recipient doesn't have to respond if he doesn't want to.
Airmail said
More info. http://kb.mozillazine.org/Figuring_out_whether_the_recipient_read_your_message
Airmail said
More info. http://kb.mozillazine.org/Figuring_out_whether_the_recipient_read_your_message
Thanks to all! Very interesting ... for now I will give up on a definitive method of determining the disposition of the message. I'll just drive over there and see what the problem was!
mike m
If you are unsure of how email works, a very good starting point is the delivery process used by the original paper mail.
Like paper mail you get no guarantee of delivery, but worse than paper mail you do not even get the "best effort" part. spam filters are very cavalier about the expectation of delivery. A large part of the lessening of the "best effort" is that your mail client, your provider, the recipients provider their mail client and a whole raft of security software at all four locations decry any real responsibility if genuine mail is not delivered. At least with the post office we had one head to bang.
Then there is the reputations of the respective providers. Just as email about fortunes from folk in Nigeria are unlikely to be taken seriously, So to does your mail provider have a reputation, as does the IP address of your device you are sending the email from. So email from say Google, Hotmail, Yahoo is unlikely to be considered spam on the face of it. Person mail from a provider mail server on a shared hosting platform such as many small businesses have can be problematical because the other users of the server might be spammers, so you get tared with their bad reputation.