"Message Read" meaning

50Twuncle

Does getting a "message read" back from an email recipient always mean that an email has been displayed on a screen - or are their circumstances when it simply means "message received" ?

securityguy

50Twuncle wrote: »

Does getting a "message read" back from an email recipient always mean that an email has been displayed on a screen - or are their circumstances when it simply means "message received" ?

It means anything they like. There's nothing stopping them from setting things up so that all mail with a request for a receipt is binned, but with the receipt sent saying it's been read. Message receipts can only work in environments under a single administrative control, and are essentially meaningless over the Internet.

System

Half the time the receiving internet email server is set up to respond to read receipts so it does not even indicate that it reached the recipient.

tronator

!!!!!! wrote: »

Half the time the receiving internet email server is set up to respond to read receipts so it does not even indicate that it reached the recipient.

I think you're talking about delivery status notifications, which are different from return receipts

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.support.thunderbird/PRlFqd4BdIQ

Back to the OP's question, a return receipt only tells you that the email was displayed on the recipients device. It doesn't necessarily mean he read it, let alone understood it .

Not all email clients will send a return receipt automatically, some will ask the recipient and some will never send it.

securityguy

tronator wrote: »

I think you're talking about delivery status notifications, which are different from return receipts

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.support.thunderbird/PRlFqd4BdIQ

Back to the OP's question, a return receipt only tells you that the email was displayed on the recipients device..

No, usually at best it tells you that it was delivered into their mailbox.

This debate has raged (well, simmered) for twenty-five years to my certain knowledge. I wasted six months of my life, albeit working with some nice people, to bodge this functionality into a mixed Uniplex/not-Uniplex environment for BT's still-born "COAST" office-automation project in about 1989. If you have a closed network where one entity controls the both the software that processes and distributes the email (the "MTA" or Message Transfer Agent) and the software by end-users to manage the mail (the "MUA" or Message User Agent) then you can do what you want and modify the protocols to taste to provide whatever extra functionality you like. Once you pass the mail to software you don't control, that software, and the people using it, can do anything with it. You can speculate about doing some fancy things with encryption and trusted hardware to restrict what can be with email, but it's not remotely suitable for deployment.

This suited the model for email in the 1980s: closed networks with very, very little focus on moving mail outside the enterprise; I can still picture standing in a corridor at UKC in the winter of 1988, being told by the guy responsible for email in BT that there was no imaginable circumstances in which BT would need to have its email network interwork with anyone outside BT. The X.400 protocols pretty much assumed that mail would be moved between enterprises by old-style monopoly PTTs (BT, France Telecom, etc) who would offer "trusted third party" services, like delivery notifications, just as they offer them today for physical letters. If you look inside Exchange, in particular, its X.400 roots shine through, and there's all sorts of dark assumptions about how mail is processed that simply aren't true in these Internet times.

But today? Email is just a string of bytes. The protocol passes the email from one place to another. The receiver is entirely free to do what it wants, and it can lie about, discard, modify or otherwise molest any requests for information to be returned. It's not fixable in any realistic way.

InsideInsurance

50Twuncle wrote: »

Does getting a "message read" back from an email recipient always mean that an email has been displayed on a screen - or are their circumstances when it simply means "message received" ?

Under normal circumstances it will mean it has been displayed, but of cause that could have been for a fraction of a second as the user flicked through their inbox and doesnt necessarily mean its actually been read.

As others have said however the read receipt request is just a flag on the email asking the client of the recipient to confirm the reading. If someone wanted to they could easily write a script to automatically send read receipts as soon as the email is received though why anyone would bother to do it is another matter.