[Dovecot] Can we know when a user read our email?

[Ed W]

On 03/06/2012 09:06, Linda Walsh wrote:
> Ed W wrote:
>>
>> Just to register interest, but at some point I will need to consider 
>> writing a plugin or similar to achieve exactly this.
>>
>> Situation is that several of our competitors offer such a feature, ie 
>> known pool of users on dialup or intermittently connected systems, 
>> provide an alert back to the sender when your email has been 
>> "accessed/downloaded" by the remote user.
> ---
>    My dentist used a service that claimed to provide a read-notification.
>
> It was just an embedded web-bug in the email that I could choose to 
> display or not ... if the client doesn't want to cooperate, you can't 
> tell when the person read it.  All you could do is tell when a client 
> downloaded it from dovecot...which doesn't say much for clients that 
> are left on 24/7...
>

Please folks - don't argue with me - I'm the wrong person!  The 
recipient who is receiving these emails, ie the person being "bugged" is 
demanding that they are "buggable".  If they demand it and it's a 
requirement for providing them service then I have to give it to them if 
I want the business.

The users are on satellite dialup and barely have enough bandwidth to 
download a few KB of emails, they certainly can't trigger web bugs to 
trigger read receipts.

Look, I can argue against the idea easily, personally my objection is 
mail loops, but the point is that the customer demands it, and at 
present that prevents me bidding for certain types of business...  
Basically the customer just wants to repro what they got with Exchange

Cheers for ideas though!

Ed W