Is there any way to get proof that an email has or has not been delivered and/or read?
Posted by Surya kant - over 11 yearsago
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The short answer is: NO. There is no way to be absolutely sure that your email has or has not been read. However, there are programs that will do the best they can.
You can set up YOUR email to request receipts and set it up to respond to read receipt requests from other people but you have no control over how your recipients email will be set up.
 But why not? Well, most email clients (Yahoo,Gmail etc.) do not respond to the request for receipts. This is to protect the users from SPAM. Imagine that you are a spammer and you send millions of emails to random names hoping that some of them will be real addresses. A read receipt tells them that they have a real address - now you can expect more Spam!
 Even if your recipient allows read receipts he may chose not to send one for individual emails - including yours. Again, no proof.
There is a FREE program that many people use called What this means is that you CAN get a confirmation that your email has been read IF the system works.Your email could have been read and you wouldn't know: there is no way to guarantee that you will get to know if and when a particular email has been opened.
For the reading confirmations:
You have to add the X-Confirm-Reading-To header.
X-Confirm-Reading-To:


For delivery confirmations:
You have to add the Disposition-Notification-To header.
For usage details see RFC 3798.
General tip for stuff like this:
Use the mail client of your choice to generate an e-mail with the desired parameters, send it to yourself and look at the mail source.
There you can find the necessary headers added by the feature you are looking for. Then read the RFC or google for specific details on the header in question.



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