Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!ames!pacbell!dsinc!syd
From: syd@DSI.COM (Syd Weinstein)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.elm
Subject: Re: Potential New ELM Feature
Message-ID: <1989Oct5.143914.9060@DSI.COM>
Date: 5 Oct 89 14:39:14 GMT
References: <340@grc.UUCP> <144@limbo.Intuitive.Com>
Reply-To: syd@DSI.COM
Organization: Datacomp Systems, Inc.  Huntingdon Valley, PA
Lines: 34

taylor@limbo.Intuitive.Com (Dave Taylor) writes:
>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.
Dave is correct, here, but there is one problem, Return-Receipt-To:
sends a receipt from every system that handles the message, and in the
uucp world, that could be a lot of receipts.  It would be nice if
the receipt came from the final system only.  Now, of course, with
SMTP there is no such problem.

[....]
>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...
Dave is a little out of date here, as Elm also adds status headers
now and they could be used to handle the 'read/not read' problem.
However, if one exits with 'X',then indeed they are not updated,
so more than one time the response could be set.

Also, I think this problem needs to be solved outside of Elm, in a
more universal fashion.  What we need is an RFC specifying the
new headers and how all conforming MUA's and MTA's are supposed to
handle this.  A discussion here followed by a general discussion
in the RFC process would handle this, but don't expect it to be
a quick process, lets just say it won't make Elm 2.3.
-- 
=====================================================================
Sydney S. Weinstein, CDP, CCP                   Elm Coordinator
Datacomp Systems, Inc.				Voice: (215) 947-9900
syd@DSI.COM or {bpa,vu-vlsi}!dsinc!syd	        FAX:   (215) 938-0235