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From: taylor@limbo.Intuitive.Com (Dave Taylor)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.elm
Subject: Re: Potential New ELM Feature
Message-ID: <144@limbo.Intuitive.Com>
Date: 4 Oct 89 16:22:54 GMT
References: <340@grc.UUCP>
Reply-To: taylor@limbo.Intuitive.Com (Dave Taylor)
Organization: Intuitive Systems, Mountain View, CA: +011 (415) 966-1151
Lines: 46

Donald D. Woelz of GRC writes:

> 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.

This is an interesting issue that I've actually put a fair amount
of thought into, for various companies...  with most Unix 
configurations, Certified mail should be done at the transport 
level (e.g. "sendmail"), and indeed currently is, if you include
the header "Return-Receipt-To: <address>" in your message.

Registered mail is a tougher one with the Elm paradigm of "don't
touch the mailbox, just read it" because it then becomes tough
to record that the user has read the message.  (that is, if I
read a message from you, then eX)it Elm, should you receive TWO
registered-mail-receipts?  One for the first time I read it, and
one for the time I re-read the message after having exited Elm)

The latter is a fairly complex issue, mostly due to the design 
principle of Elm not actually modifying any of the mailboxes it
looks at (where as Berkeley Mail, for example, adds a "Status:"
header to each message so that the program can keep track of just
this sort of thing...

More interestingly, I think, is the issue of how one would keep
track of whether receipts have been received for either of the
two types of mail.  What about, for example, a special feature
of the mail system that would keep a tally of all Certified and
Registered email that you send, and would then automatically
cross-reference and note when the receipts arrive?  Then you
could have an easy mechanism to query "what messages haven't
yet been received/read?" and so on.

		Other thoughts on this worthy idea?

						-- Dave Taylor
Intuitive Systems
Mountain View, California

taylor@limbo.intuitive.com    or   {uunet!}{decwrl,apple}!limbo!taylor