Luckily, as mentioned, the email infrastructure has also become much more reliable and mail servers are now basically always online (which wasn’t the case waaaay back when, when email was invented). The return of the receipt would reveal to spammers which email addresses still exist and/or whether or not a certain spamming technique worked and the mail got delivered to the mailbox of the recipient.Īs a result, most mail servers are nowadays configured not to send out Delivery Receipts to emails coming from the Internet. Abuse, Redundancy and Error ReportsĪn example of abuse of the Delivery Receipt feature would be when spammers send out a mass email with a Delivery Receipt request to a list of obtained or generated addresses. Requesting a Delivery Receipt for a message can be done on the Options tab. Luckily, there are other ways to verify or confirm proper email delivery. These and other developments have made the Delivery Receipt an obsolete or unwanted part of the email standard.

However, since the original idea of the Delivery Receipt, much has changed The email infrastructure has become much more reliable but the infrastructure is also being abused more. Technically speaking, Delivery Receipts indeed should be returned as soon as the message has reached its intended destination The mailbox of the recipient. How can I reliably get Delivery Receipts back when requested? However, I never seem to get these even though the messages are clearly being delivered. I do this because Read Receipts aren’t sent until the recipient actually reads the message and even then, these Read Receipts can be cancelled by the recipient or can otherwise get “lost” as well.įrom my understanding, Delivery Receipts should be returned as soon as the message is delivered in the online mailbox of the recipient, which should be within a few seconds.

I’ve sent out some really important emails and for these emails not only did I request Read Receipts, I also requested Delivery Receipts.

Hotmail outlook read receipt