#385 ✓bluesky
Ellie Putz

Return Receipt

Reported by Ellie Putz | May 1st, 2013 @ 02:58 PM

Is there a way to request notification when the recipient has read the email sent?

Comments and changes to this ticket

  • benny

    benny May 1st, 2013 @ 04:15 PM

    • State changed from “new” to “bluesky”

    Sorry, there is no such feature in MailMate. Naturally, such a feature would also rely on the recipient of the message to support it. I don't really know how widely supported it is and personally I would probably disable it if my email client supported revealing to senders whether or not I had read the message (for privacy and spam reasons).

    According to Wikipedia there are multiple ways to request notifications. The simple method of adding a Return-Receipt-To: header is possible in MailMate, but it depends on what your recipients support. Let me know if you want to know more about that.

    I'll mark this implicit request as bluesky (not going to happen soon), but you are welcome to add comments.

  • Mike K

    Mike K June 22nd, 2015 @ 08:15 AM

    Argh. Seems like every time I need to be able to do something in Mailmate, I come here to find out how, and see it's marked "bluesky".

    How do I add the custom "Return-Receipt-To:" header? I looked all over the place but I can't figure out a way to do it.

  • benny

    benny June 22nd, 2015 @ 07:59 PM

    @Mike: I'm sorry if this is a “serial problem” for you. Try reading what is noted about the “X-Priority” header in this part of the manual. You might be able to make something work for “Return-Receipt-To” (I don't have any reports about whether or not that works).

  • Lance T

    Lance T January 22nd, 2017 @ 05:35 PM

    @Mike, did you manage to find a solution to this? Its also a problem I face.

    I don't necessarily agree with @Benny as Delivery Receipts and Return Read Receipts are common in almost all mail clients these days (including GMail).

    I love Mail Mate. I used to use Pegasus Mail on Windows before I went Mac and Mail Mate is probably the best mail client I've ever used. It would be great to have this feature in it.

  • Jeremy Hunter

    Jeremy Hunter February 24th, 2017 @ 01:36 PM

    I'm with Lance and Mike on this one. Read receipt is not bluesky at this point, it's 2017. I've gotten two recent updates for mailmate and neither of them contained a single feature I was interested in. In fact, I can remember the last time mailmate added something actually useful from an email client standpoint. There are plenty of third party read receipt apps that could be integrated with all compatible with outlook, mac mail, gmail, etc.

    In the last two releases:
    New: Hardcoded a dynamic filter system. Setup a key binding like this to try it out: "u" = ( "toggleFilterKey:", "unread" );.
    New: Hidden preference: MmAlwaysMarkRepliedEmailsAsRead.
    New: sortOrder = reverseAlpha can be used to reverse the ordering of submailboxes in the Mailboxes.plist. This is a quick fix to allow reversing the order of date based submailboxes.

    "Hardcoded a dynamic filter system...." really, wtf for? Set up a key binding to try it out....... Another HIDDEN preference.....
    Reverse alpha sort mailboxes for those that have date base mailbox lists... how many people could that be?

    but no read receipt functionality... if the product was less a hobby and more of a customer product it would be great.

  • benny

    benny February 24th, 2017 @ 03:20 PM

    @Jeremy: I'm sorry if the “bluesky” label has in some way indicated that I have promised to implement read receipts some day. The “bluesky” label is intended for features that are unlikely to happen soon -- if ever. That said, some times I'm persuaded to change my mind, but I would prefer if you do that without questioning my priorities. What might seem important to you is not necessarily what is important to other users. Ironically, one of the features in your selected list above (MmAlwaysMarkRepliedEmailsAsRead) was something that Mike thinks I'm utterly stupid for not having implemented sooner. I cannot win this “game” if I'm to be shamed for both what I implement and what I do not implement.

    Now, I'd like to know more about the third party receipt apps you mention. Disregarding that I don't really like the concept of read receipts, it's not the main reason I haven't implemented it. It's just as much because it's unlikely to work well in general. Even if I implemented one of the read receipt methods I would quickly be facing reports about why it's not always working. Could you provide one or more references for me to learn more? I tried looking up how Gmail works, but that was pretty light on the details and indicated that it wouldn't work with IMAP email clients.

    I should also mention (for anyone else reading this ticket) that if I some day implement support for some kind of read receipts then it would be disabled by default -- in both directions. Tracking others and being tracked should only happen when the user explicitly allows it.

    For the record, I completely agree that there are many aspects of MailMate that could be improved and that it should ideally be done at a much faster rate, but I'm doing the best I can.

  • Daniel Staal

    Daniel Staal August 15th, 2018 @ 03:34 PM

    Just wanted to add my support for it as a feature. In general I don't really like read receipts, and I know that they may or may not be supported (or sent, even if supported) at the other end, but they are a common and normal feature of email clients, and I run into them regularly. They also are useful occasionally, if you don't expect them to work perfectly.

    My previous favorite email client was Mulberry, which handled them fine. It's most recent release was 11 years ago. For more info, I'd suggest starting at the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_receipt - it lists several relevant RFCs. Also looking relevant is: https://www.chilkatsoft.com/p/p_313.asp

  • benny

    benny August 17th, 2018 @ 01:10 PM

    @Daniel: Based on the content of this ticket it seems people have very different ideas of what a read receipt is. This is emphasized by your wikipedia link which starts out by arguing that the term shouldn't be used at all. Then it goes on to describe a few systems for delivery disposition notifications. Therefore I'd like to ask: Which one of these does Mulberry use? (It might not be what you are looking for, but there is this experimental hidden preference which should still work.)

  • benny

    benny August 17th, 2018 @ 01:14 PM

    @Daniel: Your other link indicates that you could try MmAdditionalComposerHeaders. And please let me know if it's useful. I could then perhaps make it more easily available.

  • Alex Veer
  • Alex Veer

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