Delivery notification?

Asked by J-adam-b

I searched the questions and FAQ and didn't see anything pertaining to my question.

Email programs typically allow you to receive notification when the recipient has read your message.

Is that available when using GNU Mailman? GNU Mailman is used by my provider (Site5), but I don't see anything in any configuration page that would allow this. If I send an email to a list with the preference turned on, does GNU Mailman forward that so that I would receive notifications from all the people on the list that read my email?

Site5 currently runs GNU Mailman v2.1.26.

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Mark Sapiro
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Best Mark Sapiro (msapiro) said :
#1

I won't go into all the reasons why these notifications are unreliable at best, but to answer your question, Mailman strips the following headers from list posts:

  Return-Receipt-To
  Disposition-Notification-To
  X-Confirm-Reading-To
  X-Pmrqc

We are not aware of others that can be used for this purpose, but if we were, we'd remove those too.

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J-adam-b (j-adam-b) said :
#2

Thanks for the information. At least now I know it can't be done. I was hoping for a simple way to determine when people on the list read the email sent out. Hard to tell if people are not getting emails (notifications would certainly eliminate all those who did get it). I'm dealing with simple folk so the standard notification would probably work for the part. If you do have any suggestions for how to help ensure everybody on the list is receiving emails, please let me know.

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Mark Sapiro (msapiro) said :
#3

If you think with a return receipt requested, you would get one from everyone who opens the mail, you're deluding yourself. Some mail clients will respond, some will do nothing and some will ask the user whether to send a receipt or not.

Then, even if a receipt is sent does it go to the poster (which may work for you, but not in general) or to the envelope sender which is the list-bounces address.

The answer is if your list is doing bounce processing and you are not receiving bounces, the mail is being delivered to the recipient ISPs. There is no way to know what happens after that. I.e. is it delivered to the user's inbox, to a spam or bulk folder or just accepted by the ISP but not delivered.