Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!wuarchive!uwm.edu!grc!don
From: don@grc.UUCP (Donald D. Woelz)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.elm
Subject: Potential New ELM Feature
Message-ID: <340@grc.UUCP>
Date: 3 Oct 89 16:56:21 GMT
Reply-To: don@grc.UUCP (Donald D. Woelz)
Organization: GENROCO, Inc., Slinger, WI
Lines: 44

While we are all in the mode of suggesting new features for ELM, I have
a suggestion of my own for the next version.  But first some background
so that you might understand why this feature could be important.

We have been using ELM now for several years.  Our organization uses ELM
throughout the entire organization.  We are a small company with about 40
employees in three offices located in the U.S., the U.K. and Hong Kong.
Literally every employee uses email and hence ELM.  We consider ourselves
to be about as close to a paperless office as you can reasonable get and
rely very heavily on email for all corporate communications.

Because the world exists, systems crash and communications get disrupted
on occasion.  This means that email doesn't always get where it is
supposed to go.  Neither the sender nor the recipient are always aware
that a piece of critical mail is lost.

Now for the proposal:  I think that some kind of feature to do the
equivalent of Ceritifed and Registered mail would be very useful to
indicate, at least to the sender, that his email has gone through.
Certified mail would be a piece of email sent back to the originator
indicating that his mail was indeed appended to the recipients
mailbox.  Registered email would be a piece or email sent back to
the originator indicating that the recipient has looked at the
piece of mail.

How can this be done?  Well, I am not by any means an expert at programming
this sort of stuff, but here are my thoughts.  First of all, I realize
that if the recipient is not using ELM, this would probably fall apart,
so let's assume that this will only work if both the sender and recipient
are using ELM.  Could one not create a special header field that would
indicate that the mail is either certified or registered?  If so, then
when a recipient invokes ELM, ELM scans the mailbox and, if there are
any certified email messages, send a receipt back to the sender.  The dates
can be checked to avoid sending a receipt for the same message each time
the mailbox is opened.  Similarly, ELM already keeps track of which
messages have been read, so when it finds that the user has read a
registered email message, it sends a receipt to the sender indicated so.

Enough said by me.  Anybody else have any comments on this?
-- 
Don Woelz              {ames, rutgers, harvard}!uwvax!uwmcsd4!grc!don
GENROCO, Inc.                              Phone: 414-644-8700
205 Kettle Moraine Drive North             Fax:   414-644-6667
Slinger, WI 53086                          Telex: 6717062 or 158279420