How can I get confirmation that my email was received by addressee?

Hello and welcome to discussions,

There is no way to do this in Apple Mail.

There are, I believe, some 3rd party Applications that will allow this - They require both parties to install and run them though.

Regards.

Ian.

Request Read Receipts in Mac OS X Mail

To make Mac OS X Mail request a read receipt for every message you send:

Open Terminal.
Type "defaults read com.apple.mail UserHeaders".
Press Enter.
If that command returns "The domain/default pair of (com.apple.mail, UserHeaders) does not exist":
Type
defaults write com.apple.mail UserHeaders '{"Disposition-Notification-To" = "Name <email@address>"; }'
replacing Name with your name and email@address with your email address.
The complete line could read "defaults write com.apple.mail UserHeaders '{"Disposition-Notification-To" = "Heinz Tschabitscher <sender@example.com>"; }'", for example.
If the "defaults read" command above returns a line of values that starts with "{" and ends in "}":
Highlight the entire line. It might read something like {Bcc = "bcc@example.com"; }, for example.
Press Command-C.
Type "defaults write com.apple.mail UserHeaders '" (excluding the outer quotation marks).
Press Command-V.
Type "'".
Insert '"Disposition-Notification-To" = "Name <email@address>"; ' in front of the closing "}" character, replacing Name with your name and email@address with your email address.
The line might now read
defaults write com.apple.mail UserHeaders '{Bcc = "bcc@example.com"; "Disposition-Notification-To" = "Heinz Tschabitscher <sender@example.com>"; }'
, for example.
Press Enter.

Good luck with this. No matter what you do to request a receipt, just about every email client out there has this function turned off or requires end user input by default. You can't make a remote mail client do what you want and I don't want my email client to acknowledge Spam or Junk mails.

This was a good idea in the 90's before the spam storm began.

Getting receipt confirmation is crucially important for my work. I constantly deliver documents to clients, working to deadlines, and it's very important that they confirm receipt of my documents so that I have a record of delivery date and time.

I imagine I'm not the only one who works in this way.

I find it incredible that Apple Mail doesn't include this perfectly normal facility, which comes as standard in every other email application.

Luckily we don't have to use Apple Mail 🙂

I suggest to the OP that they look at these other alternatives.

As mentioned above by dechamp, you may request a receipt but it is up
to the recipient to allow that to happen. The recipient must have their
email client configured to send the receipt (most have this off by default).
You cannot force the recipient to send a read receipt.

Dave

Have you thought about maybe making a signature that you can append to your mail message by selecting it from the signatures pulldown menu that says something like: Would you please click on your "reply" and "send" softkeys? No written message is necessary with your reply, but if you do this, then I will know that you have received and read my email and I won't need to resend it to you. Thanks!

If they're too lazy or too rude to comply with your politely worded request, you can bet that they would decline to send a receipt, too. Or their mail client doesn't support it anyways.

Hi Tom. It's possible to configure Apple's Mail program to ask for read receipts to be returned, by entering the Terminal commands that have already been posted above.

But the most important thing to remember is that the recipient's e-mail program must be configured to respond to those receipt requests. If the recipient won't turn that feature on, then nothing you can do on your end will result in a read receipt being returned to you from that recipient.

I personally would never configure any e-mail program to automatically respond to read receipt requests, because I consider it nobody's business but my own if I have read my e-mail or not.

Hi,

Did you try the script as posted by sjain? I have yet to test this and was wondering if you had any results?

Cheers.


Ian.