Be alerted to 'read receipts' in Mail messages

Mar 08, '06 07:00:00AM

Contributed by: Skurfer

After years with Thunderbird, I decided to give Mail a serious look. To avoid boring everyone, I'll just say that I'm quite happy. One thing I noticed, though, is that Mail doesn't seem to be aware of "read receipts" in any way. This comes as a big surprise to me, since my introduction to the idea of read receipts came from the very same Mail.app (13 years ago when OS X was still called NeXTstep).

Anyway, I wasn't interested in emulating full read receipt support as discussed in a previous hint, but I was curious to see which of my control-freak contacts were requesting them. The following will allow you to more easily see if a read receipt was requested.

  1. Go to Mail's Preferences
  2. Go to the Viewing section
  3. Next to Show header detail:, choose "Custom..."
  4. In the panel that comes up, click the + to add a header
  5. Type (or paste) Disposition-Notification-To
  6. Click OK and close the Preferences window
Now, any message that requests a read receipt will show you the extra header. It's a bit ugly when it happens (compared to the usual headers display). However, the additional header is only displayed for messages that contain it (a small minority in my case), and the ugliness makes it stand out, which is the whole point.

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