Posted by Richard Lynch on 04/06/05 07:56

On Wed, March 30, 2005 8:31 am, marc serra said:
> I got a problem with mail function. I want to know if it's possible to
> send a email in php and to get back an acknowledgement of delivery. My
> problem is that i want to know if my emails are delivered successfully
> to recipients.
>
> Can you please tell how to do this if there is a solution.

There really is *NOT* a solution for this, unless you send the recipient a
unique token, and get them to click on a link that tells you they saw it.

Even that, somebody somewhere *could* write a script to fool you, unless
you also try to check that they are human when the click with one of those
warped text images. Google for 'captcha'

Things that fail, and why/how:

Return-receipt:
The original plan was to have email clients return a receipt when an email
was opened.
Alas, privacy considerations, sheer volume of traffic, and people sending
them to lists of THOUSANDS of recipients made these completely useless.

Embed image with unique URL in HTML-enhanced (cough, cough) email:
Again, privacy concerns mean some people will force this to not work.
Plus, many email clients don't (or were configured not to) do HTML
enhanced email.
Security issues with HTML-enhanced email and privacy concerns killed it.

When you get right down to it, I guess the bottom line is always:

It's none of your damn business when/if I read your stupid email. :-)

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