[imp] return receipt

[Steven Patterson]

I don't know when return receipts in IMP came in (I don't think my 2.2.4 has
it?) but if somebody will point me at an appropriate place to start working
from I might be able to get a look at the coding at some point.  In the mean
time, here's my explanation.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Chuck Hagenbuch" <chuck@horde.org>
To: <imp@lists.horde.org>
Sent: Wednesday, April 04, 2001 5:29 PM
Subject: Re: [imp] return receipt


> Return receipts aren't terribly standard, and I didn't find any
documentation at
> the  time; if someone who knows how they're supposed to work could look at
our
> implementation and send in a patch, or at least say what's wrong and help
test,
> I'll fix it.

By return receipts I assume we mean an aknowledgment that a message has been
delivered and/or read?

Delivery receipts are an ESMTP thing - when submitting to an ESMTP mail
server you'd do this in the RCPT TO for each person for which you want a
delivery receipt:

RCPT TO: <person@somewhere> NOTIFY=SUCCESS

The mail server which performs final local delivery generates a MIME
multipart message which goes back to the envelope sender (MAIL FROM:)

Now all that's a bit useless in that IMP generally calls sendmail (or
whatever) directly from the command line (and not in SMTP mode) so a quick
look at the bat book says the same can be acheived using the switch '-N
success' to sendmail.  I've just tested it and it works (and any ESMTP
mailer should generate a receipt).

Message read receipts are a mail client feature and entirely overrideable by
the end user (recipient).  However a quick test from Outlook Express shows
that to request a return receipt to a message (READ receipt) on puts the
following in the headers:

Disposition-Notification-To: "Real Name" <someone@somewhere>

The recipients mail client sees this and if it chooses to honour it will
send a return reciept.  If we're interested in IMP sending such then you may
also wish to know that it's of the form:

Content-Type: multipart/report;
 report-type=disposition-notification;
 boundary="whatever-mime-boundary"

The first part is just an human language message of text/plain type saying
"This is a return receipt for the mail you sent to so-and-so
<person@somwhere> on April 1st 2001" and the second part has the following
structure:

(mime boundary)
Content-Type: message/disposition-notification
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Disposition: inline

Final-Recipient: rfc822;person@somewhere
Original-Message-ID: <blah@somewhere>
Disposition: manual-action/MDN-sent-manually; displayed

(mime boundary)

There's some information anyway, like I said I'm not opposed to doing some
coding on this if you can point me to a sensible bit of source (e.g. should
I work from the CVS or from a previous stable release?) and you're not in a
rush! ;)
--
Steven Patterson, MSci ----------------------------------------------+
|       Electronic Information Systems Support and Development       |
|         Computing Services, University of Southampton, UK.         |
+-------------------------------------------- Tel: +44 (0) 2380 595810
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..  I have suffered for my anger, there are wars that can't be won  ..
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