From: Brian Clapper (bmc@WillsCreek.com)
Date: Thu Jan 18 2001 - 12:48:28 PST
Joseph S. Barrera III <joe@barrera.org> wrote:
> Yeah, as if. Just how many people out there actually know how to
> get their mail client to not sent read receipts? Not many, I'd bet.
Probably about as many as know how to disable sending HTML mail.
Then, Robert S. Thau <rst@ai.mit.edu> wrote:
> How many have MUAs that send receipts? It's a serious question ---
> I'm not aware of one that does, but I don't know PC MUAs well at all,
> and I might just not be paying attention.
Back in 1995, a friend of mine worked for an organization that mandated use
of Novell's Groupwise. I don't know if Groupwise still behaves this way,
but back then, at least at his installation, it had the annoying habit of
sending notices such as "Moe has received your message" and "Curley has
opened your message". But it didn't just restrict those notifications to
local Groupwise users. Whenever I sent him a message (over the Internet,
from a completely different company), I'd get one notice when the message
was delivered and another when he opened it.
It was highly annoying.
The behavior didn't appear to be in response to something in my messages. I
certainly wasn't knowingly requesting those notices. There were no headers
in my outgoing mail that even remotely could be construed as requesting
mail delivery and/or disposition notices. Other people who corresponded
with him also got similar notices.
Worse, my friend (then a system administrator who usually had no difficulty
finding his way around a computer) couldn't find a setting in the Groupwise
client to disable it. He speculated that the sending of such notices was
configured on the Groupwise server, over which he had no control. (He had
no access to server docs to prove or disprove his speculation.)
It was a relief when he finally installed an unapproved SMTP server to
exchange email with the outside world.
Brian Clapper, bmc@WillsCreek.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Jan 19 2001 - 05:08:34 PST