05/12/2009 23:25

578 Disposition Notifications and Random Mail Clients

I just discovered that here in 2009, people are still requesting return receipts on email. They're probably even relying upon them to determine whether or not someone has viewed their missives. For some reason, this has totally blown my mind. For at least ten years, I've been using an email client called Becky Mail. Only one other person I know has ever actually used Becky Mail, and he's the one who introduced me to it. I'd make a reasonable guess that five-nines worth of Americans who use email on a daily basis have never heard of Becky Mail. I've evangelized Becky Mail to friends and coworkers, but I doubt any of them ever followed up. Yet Becky Mail is a full-featured email client that does everything I need: secure IMAP over SSL/TLS, threading, filtering, IMAP folder support that works hand-in-hand with procmail, etc. Plus it's written with security in mind. HTML doesn't render by default, images don't load by default, and when I click a link in an email, a warning dialog pops up to prevent accidental malware launches (these settings can be overridden by the eager and trojan-prone). As far as I'm concerned, this is the perfect email client for the tech-savvy user. It'll do plain old POP and SMTP if that's the only challenge you pose, but it'll handle paranoid geeks' security requirements with equal finesse and integration. Becky Mail, with its default settings, mostly eliminates email as an attack vector for your enterprise. What prompted this rant is that my Becky Mail settings at home differed from those at work, and I've just now noticed. One of Becky's options is "How to respond to a request for 'read receipt'." The options are "Ask User," "Respond Automatically," and "Ignore." At work, I'm set up to Ignore Disposition-Notification-To headers. At home, I'm set to Ask User. And so, when I happened to load a work-related email from home this evening, a dialog appeared asking whether or not I'd like to send a return receipt. And I said, "fuck no." I hope that over the past several years, I've not disappointed anyone at work by neglecting to send return receipts. I hope, as well, that my lack of return receipts - accompanied by my almost immediate response to most emails, proving that I'd read them even without issuing a disposition notification - has helped to condition at least a few fellow enterprise email users that return receipts aren't a guarantee of anything. Not everyone uses Outlook, and some folks even use mutt. Even in 2009. * I've been using pirated/cracked versions of Becky Mail until today. I just put forth the $40 to register the client. It's well overdue, and it's sort of ironic: some Outlook user's request for a return receipt prompted my registration of a shareware app.