Hi!
How do I make a one-time request for a read receipt on the fly when composing an email in the RB7 web client?
Thanks.
D.
Hello @davidjj
We don’t support read receipts are they are not a standard email feature.
The ones that work well are on corporate networks where mail between employees can reliably be given the status of read and a receipt sent, but ones that are between Internet email providers don’t work in the same way and often rely on the person reading the email to have an email program that can send a receipt and in those cases it will ask the recipient if they want to send one or not.
This renders the feature unreliable and arguably impinges on the recipients privacy.
I don’t really see how it impinges on the recipient’s privacy as long as the recipient can choose to long-term cancel the feature, or to set it to be opt-in on each individual email.
As to the fact that it’s not supported by an official header, well, that’s why X-headers were invented, because users discovered that there were useful features which could easily be enabled but were not supported by official headers.
At least I now know that I’m not going crazy when I can’t find the button for it, and I understand your logic in not supporting read receipts.
I guess I’ll have to just continue adding “Please acknowledge receipt” in boldface to many of my emails.
Thanks.
D.
Read receipt are broken beyond imagination:
They enable synchronous communication in an asynchronous by nature system. There are at least 2 competing ways to do them (official RFC content-disposition-to and non-official read-receipt-to) and they vastly differ from each other. Every part of this is by design opt-out so a lot of servers and clients just don’t support it. You can’t force anyone with saying “you didn’t read my email!”, cause there can be multiple servers in chain that just won’t accept this header.
It reminds me of the sweet 90s corporations where everything was either Word doc or Excel and everyone was sittings in suits.
It’s 2021, if you want something from someone now, just use messaging. If it can wait (for any reason) use email. If it’s crucial to keep track of things, use ticketing systems that track people effiiciently and they can mark stuff.
If you want to stuck to 90s, use 90s tools like MS Outlook or Thunderbird 
They will add headers for you.