RSVP (automatic receipts)

[zben at umcp-cs.UUCP]

[From the virtual flamethrower of ZBEN]
Excerpts from recent postings:

    Something that will inform the person who sent mail to one or
    more users, that his(her) mail has been READ by the receipient(s). 
    Just delivering mail and EXPECTING the other person to have read
    is not good enough. 
    Praveen
    ..hplabs!omsvax!pkb
    ..decvax!microsoft!omsvax!pkb

    From: greep%su-dsn at sri-unix.UUCP
    Re your question about having the sender of a message notified when the
    recipient reads it: this can be trickier than it sounds.  For example, if
    the recipient's secretary reads the message, does that count?  How about if
    a program reads it (eg sometimes someone will set up a program to send out
    a form reply saying "I'm out of town so don't expect a reply this week").
    What if the recipient doesn't want you to know whether he's read it or not?
    The most surefire way is probably to have a command in the the recipient's
    mail system that lets him easily generate a reply saying "I've seen your
    message about ...".  (You have to make sure this doesn't cause a loop by
    having these things reply to each other.)

Can I suggest a compromise?

 I have been maintaining a local-only mailer on a dinosaur system for
about two years now.  It's pretty brain-damaged but I am recreating it
[in my own image :-)] and making it talk to some 4341s and the INTERNET.
But it does have an automatic RSVP feature.  Hence I have had to deal
with the following:

 There is a female user who objects to a particular mail user who is
always sending (I assume unwanted) RSVP messages.  In theory this could
actually be a danger to the woman, if it could be assumed that due to
lack of her own terminal at home she would be at work/school, perhaps late
on a lonely night.

 On the other hand my boss and several other supervisors told me it was the
best thing since sliced bread, and that they used it to check up on their
employees.  I know my boss uses it regularly (RSVP is shown in the header).

 Suggestion: make the mailers in question recognize an RSVP request, but
then ASK the user what to do.  Her responses would be Y, send back a message,
N, do not send back a message at the current time, or X, do not send back a
message at this time and REMOVE THE RSVP FLAG from the item.  I assume it
would nag you everytime you read that mail until you answered Y or X...

 Whether this would be worth doing over the net is an open question.

    Further discussion along these lines probably belongs on MsgGroup, where
    I think the subject has been discussed already.

Any idea what a MsgGroup might be?

zben      ...seismo!umcp-cs!zben     zben at umd2.ARPA