An alternative way to request read reciepts
- by lavanyadeepak
An alternative way to request read reciepts
Sometime or other we use messaging namespaces like System.Net.Mail or System.Web.Mail to send emails from our applications. When we would need to include headers to request delivery or return reciepts (often called as Message Disposition Notifications) we lock ourselves to the limitation that not all email servers/email clients can satisfy this. We can enhance this border a little now, thanks to a new innovation I discovered from Gawab.
It embeds a small invisible image of 1x1 dimension and the image source reads as recieptimg.php?id=2323425324. When this image is requested by the web browser or email client, the serverside handler does a smart mapping based on the ID to indicate that the message was read. We call them as 'Web Bugs'. But wait it is not a fool proof solution since spammers misuse this technique to confirm activeness of an email address and most of the email clients suppress inline images for security reasons.
I just thought anyway would share this observation for the benefit of others.
