Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!wubios!phil
From: phil@wubios.wustl.edu (J. Philip Miller)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.elm
Subject: Re: Potential New ELM Feature
Message-ID: <927@wubios.wustl.edu>
Date: 5 Oct 89 13:09:00 GMT
References: <340@grc.UUCP>
Sender: phil@wubios.wustl.edu (J. Philip Miller)
Reply-To: phil@wubios.WUstl.edu (J. Philip Miller)
Organization: Washington University (St. Louis)
Lines: 48

In article <340@grc.UUCP> don@grc.UUCP (Donald D. Woelz) 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.
>
Both PROFS and RICE/MAIL in the IBM environment attempt to do this.  From time
to time on the MAILBOOK LISTSERV group on Bitnet, this proposal is brought up
again because MAIL does it by inserting a "hidden record" within the body of
the mail message rather than by inserting an actual new header.  One of the
stumbling blocks was gaining agreement among the "header peopple" on a syntax
for defining a new header, adding it to RFC822 (the RFC actually acknowledges
the possibility for adding a new standard header, although it has never
actually been done :-).

It seems silly to implement this in ELM in a way which is incompatible with
other systems.  Your proposal suggests that an acknowledgement be sent
(optionally) both at the first time that ELM sees the message and at the first
time that a user actually reads the message.  This would be fairly easy to
implement in ELM, but others would argue that there should be an
acknowledgement sent when it is actually placed in your mailbox, not the first
time that ELM sees it, That is I want to know when the message has actually
arrived (hopefully safely) at the recepient's machine.  This requires changes
to the MTA, not to ELM and points out the need for standardization before
going off and implementing such a scheme.

Another area requiring some coordination with the MTA is that most people who
have entered into the discussions previously have indicated that they want to
be able to specify a particular address where the acknowledgement is sent,
rather than automatically back to the from address.  If so, then all gateways
and other MTA who mangle the from header also need to be educated about the
new header.

In short, this is an excellent idea.  It has proved to be very useful in other
MUA systems, but the experience there suggests that for it to work well, there
needs to be a standard developed so that (over time at least) all the relevant
software gets changed and we all do our work more productively.

-phil
-- 
     J. Philip Miller, Professor, Division of Biostatistics, Box 8067
	 Washington University Medical School, St. Louis MO 63110
phil@wubios.WUstl.edu - Internet  (314) 362-3617   phil@wubios.wustl - bitnet
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