The Computer Corner

Reliable receipts?
By Charles Miller

After reading last week’s column, and not wanting to trust sending me an email, an Atención reader stopped me on the street with a question. He wanted to know how to verify his emails were getting through to their destinations.

He was not entirely pleased when I told him that just because you send an email, there is just no guarantee it will reach its destination. The situation is the same with snail-mail; when you drop a letter in the mailbox, you have no way to know whether or not it ever gets to its destination.

Most email clients such as Outlook, Eudora, Pegasus, etc. include a feature allowing you to request a confirmation for your email by turning on the “Return-Receipt” feature. My friend already knew about that, but his question was how reliable was this feature.

When your email client requests a return receipt, a header is added to the email requesting a confirmation email response from the computer on the other end. When the recipient opens your email, you get an email back saying they opened the message. This can be useful if your message is important; it can also just be a matter of convenience such as when you want to phone the addressee to discuss the email, but want to wait until they have read it.

The problem with return receipts is that all this tells you is that they received the message but not that they opened and read it. On top of that, a lot of email programs give the recipient the option of not sending the return receipt.

Some software can even be configured to never send receipts; moreover, many corporate networks do not honor requests for receipts out of privacy concerns. Furthermore, some Internet Service Providers and corporate network mail servers strip out all requests for return receipts from email in order to reduce the volume of traffic they have to handle.

In other words, between the software that puts privacy control in the hands of the end-user and the other places the receipts can be blocked, email return receipts are basically worthless.

This is not a hopeless situation though. If you really need to monitor whether or not your emails are getting through, there are companies that can do this for you, but for a price.

I am not going to endorse any company in particular, but there are several in this business. Using one of the internet search engines will quickly find them if you search for the keywords “email” “return receipt” and “verify.”

The service provided by these companies is to keep track of all your email and notify you when and if the recipient reads it. The way this works is that you send your emails not to the recipient but to the company server and they in turn notify the recipient to come read it. When the recipient comes to their server to read your email, the date and time of that visit are recorded. The company then sends you a return receipt.

Handling email in this manner gives the company a lot more control over your emails. Some of the companies offer more advanced features such as emails that self-destruct so they can be read only once. It is also possible to make it difficult (albeit not impossible) to print, copy or forward your emails as well as to put an expiration date on them.

Some email users, especially business people and attorneys, find the annual US$25-$50 price of this service worth the cost.

Charles Miller is a freelance computer consultant, a frequent visitor to San Miguel since 1981 and now practically a full-time resident. He may be contacted at 044-415-101-8528 or email FAQ@SMAguru.com.