amanda@lts.UUCP (04/14/89)
I agree that it should be up to the receiving user to acknowledge (or not) a particular message, but I do think that there is definitely a place for a "weaker" version of delivery receipts, that is, some kind of positive confirmation of delivery whether or not is was read. To draw an analogy to physical mail, if I send a piece of registered mail to someone, they can refuse to accept it, but I can still verify that it actually got so far as their post office, and that delivery was attempted. This distinction carries over into electronic mail as well. Delivery receipts address two separate problems, as I see it. The first is whether or not the message ever actually was placed into the recipient's mailbox, and the second is whether or not he or she actually read it (or is willing to acknowledge having read it). If I send some mail that I expect someone to read, I would find it very useful to know which of these cases is at work. If it never got there in the first place, then I have a problem with a mailer somewhere. If the recipient didn't care to read it, then I have a problem with that person :-). Knowing which is the case helps me decide what to do about it... Amanda Walker InterCon Systems Corporation amanda@lts.UUCP
msmith@topaz.rutgers.edu (Mark Robert Smith) (04/14/89)
One feature that was suggested to me by a friend (Denise Fishburne, for the record) is the ability to refuse mail before reading it. We'd like to be able to delete the message and send a message back to the sender saying "This mail was received and refused by the addressee", meaning that we got it but never read it, and sent it back. In the days of flames and junk e-mail, this function would be quite useful. Mark -- Mark Smith (alias Smitty) "Be careful when looking into the distance, RPO 1604; P.O. Box 5063 that you do not miss what is right under your nose." New Brunswick, NJ 08903-5063 rutgers!topaz.rutgers.edu!msmith (OK, Bob?) msmith@topaz.rutgers.edu
cfe+@andrew.cmu.edu (Craig F. Everhart) (04/15/89)
Andrew (AMS) lets you do this, too. You can write a function to file each
incoming message. One of the things that's completely possible is to reject
some or all incoming mail back to its sender with whatever message seems
appropriate. (Check comp.soft-sys.andrew for further information.)
Craig Everhartwyle@inf.ethz.ch (Mitchell Wyle) (04/17/89)
In article <Apr.13.18.15.59.1989.20117@topaz.rutgers.edu> msmith@topaz.rutgers.edu (Mark Robert Smith) writes: >We'd like to be able to delete the message and send a message back to the >sender saying "This mail was received and refused by the addressee", >meaning that we got it but never read it, and sent it back. Using Dave Taylor's filter(l) program which comes with elm, or my MailFilter program, you *CAN* do exactly that. With MailFilter, you create a new directory (doesn't matter what it's called) in the MailFilter installation directory; you then put a regular expression in a file called "pattern" and a simple script in a file called "action." In this case, the action could be something simple like: #!/bin/sh badguy=msmith@topaz.rutgers.edu { echo "This mail was received and refused by the addressee:" echo "" cat } | mail $badguy and the pattern could be something like "msmith@topaz|gbush@whitehouse" I actually used stuff like this "bouncer" program for a while because a certain European standard for message interchange (which shall remain unnamed to protect the guilty) sends a lot of garbage mail. I recently turned the bouncer off, and use a program which simply, silently deletes the messages before I see them. It's better not to send inflamatory mail, and such auto-replies could be considered flames themselves. In my case, the auto-replies were indeed construed as flames, so I turned them off. But two years later, the "*STANDARD*" champions actually violated their own standard to shut-up the obnoxious messages it produces. I hadn't actually seen any of them for a while, but apparently others had... Such obnoxious automatically-generated messages can also cause mailer loops; think about what happens if messages like that get sent to an archive-server, and if your standard does not include a hop-count... -- -Mitchell F. Wyle wyle@ethz.uucp Institut fuer Informationssysteme wyle@inf.ethz.ch ETH Zentrum / 8092 Zurich, Switzerland +41 1 256 5237
chip@ateng.ateng.com (Chip Salzenberg) (04/18/89)
According to cfe+@andrew.cmu.edu (Craig F. Everhart): >Andrew (AMS) lets you do this, too. You can write a function to file each >incoming message. For sites without the Andrew Message System, my "deliver" program permits similar processing, albeit in an undoubtedly primitive fashion compared to AMS. Deliver gives all mail over to the control of a user-written script for the shell of your choice. -- Chip Salzenberg <chip@ateng.com> or <uunet!ateng!chip> A T Engineering Me? Speak for my company? Surely you jest! "It's no good. They're tapping the lines."