Entourage Read Receipt
Ever sent an email and wondered if it arrived? In this age of dodgy spam filters and abandoned email addresses, the disappearance of emails is a growing problem. Wouldn’t it be good if there were some way of finding out?
Fortunately, some clever people have already thought of a solution: the “Disposition-Notification-To” (DNT) email header. What does this do? If you add this, invisibly, to your email message, any compliant email program will send you back an email to tell you the message has been received or read.
Note the word ‘compliant’ there. Unfortunately, Entourage X and 2004 – unlike their Windows-based cousin, Outlook – don’t have a facility for easily adding the DNT header to email messages, although you can configure any of your email accounts to add the header to every message you send out; they also ignore requests for ‘read receipts’ in any incoming emails.
This is where this package of scripts comes in. Included is a script for detecting the DNT header in incoming messages and sending back a standards-compliant read receipt that includes both human and machine-readable notifications that you’ve received the message. There are also two scripts for adding the DNT header to your own outgoing messages: one that simply toggles the header on and off for each of your email accounts (if the account already has the DNT header it’s removed, without affecting any other headers you might have; if the account doesn’t yet have the DNT header, it’s added); and one that lets you pick which accounts you want the headers added to.
For more information about read receipts and Entourage – and some caveats about their use – please visit http://www.entourage.mvps.org/faq_topic/return_receipt.html.System requirements
- Entourage X/2004
Download the latest version (1.0)
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| Version history | |
|---|---|
| 1.0 | No bugs reported, so it must be all right! |
| 1.0b1 | Initial release. No testing done with Entourage X. Let me know if you have any problems with any of it! |
Last updated: May 1, 2008
Comments
I made all as descrived but it wprk only with entourage owner; if i send a receive request to outlook owner, he doesn't see it...
Thank you,
Stefano
stefano sasso | August 9, 2007 2:51 PM | Reply
It works just fine with Outlook recipients: I get responses from them all the time. It's probably that the people you're sending messages to haven't got Outlook configured to send back read receipts or they're being filtered by an email server at some point. Please read the caveats hyperlink above.
Have just tested this with Entourage 2008 and working okay here with both Entourage and Outlook recipients.
Anonymous | June 3, 2008 11:50 AM | Reply