Read Receipt and the one that was deleted without being read... !!

Dear(s)

In this beautiful ‘e-World’ – most of the correspondence is by e-mail. Another matter that modern day youngsters would spend their lives sending SMS, msg on WA and more.  E-mail is a powerful and quick communication [slow, lengthy and too traditional by some standards] and better way to record things and keep group of people informed of the activities that are taking place.  This is no post on its benefits nor the etiquettes !

Many Organisations use ‘lotus note’ – an application suite that has : email; calendaring and scheduling; address book and the like.   Unlike other application suites that splits these functionalities into distinctly different products – Lotus Notes present all the components together.  Infact, it is no longer Lotus Notes but ‘IBM Notes’ - and IBM Domino are the client and server, respectively, of a collaborative client-server software platform from IBM. In November 2012, IBM announced it would be dropping the Lotus brand and moving forward with the IBM brand only to identify products, including Notes and Domino.

Getting back to the post, We have been sending E mails for long  & Lotus Note users do know that confirmation of the recipient accessing the mail can be had by putting "read receipt".  Sometimes, apart from the general confirmation "received", there have been weird messages such as 'this is a confirmation that the message was displayed but not necessarily understood"  BUT this one seen under is bizarre.  The subject line read :  Not read: RE: ….(Ref) .......... infact was deleted without being read.

Technically, a ‘ read receipt ’ is an email notification delivered when a recipient opens (and presumably reads) an email you send. The receipt confirms that the recipient saw your message and records the time. When you view a message for which you've requested a receipt, the current status appears just below the body of the message in the web-based Gmail client.

Email tracking is a method for monitoring the email delivery to intended recipient. Most tracking technologies utilize some form of digitally time-stamped record to reveal the exact time and date that your email was received or opened, as well the IP address of the recipient. Email tracking is useful when the sender wants to know if the intended recipient actually received the email, or if they clicked the links. However, due to the nature of the technology, email tracking cannot be considered an absolutely accurate indicator that a message was opened or read by the recipient.

However, requesting a receipt does not guarantee that you will get one, for several reasons. Not all email applications or services support read receipts, and users can generally disable the functionality if they so wish. Those that do support it aren't necessarily compatible with or capable of recognizing requests from a different email service or application. Generally read receipts are only useful within an organization where all employees/members are using the same email service and application.

Read receipts are sent back to your Inbox as email messages. Additional technical information, such as who it is from, the email software they use, and the IP addresses of the sender and their email server is available inside the Internet headers of the read receipt. The technical term for these is MDN - Message Disposition Notifications.  Another kind of receipt can be requested, which is called a DSN (delivery status notification), which is a request to the recipients email server to send you a notification about the delivery of an email you've just sent. Some email marketing tools include tracking as a feature. Such email tracking is usually accomplished using standard web tracking devices known as cookies and web beacons. Email marketing users can view reports on both aggregate response statistics and individual response over time.

With  Regards,

S. Sampathkumar

PS :  Nothing to get disheartened with the read receipt : ‘Not read: RE: ….(Ref) .......... infact was deleted without being read.’ …  in all probability the recipient accesses the same mail on laptop/desktop as also with handheld devices – and perhaps deletes them on laptop/desktop later without opening !!  

Circulated to my group a few years ago … and now posted here on the blog.