Re: snooping -- A divergent view here, from a colleague of Rich Graves.
Let's split this complaint up into its component parts. I believe it's absolutely justified to support delivery receipts; that is, telling the sender whether or not his mail was delivered to the destination mailbox. Given how unreliable Internet mail has been at times, this feature makes sense, and is analogous to asking the US Postal Service to send registered mail.
As for read receipts (or deletion receipts), I can understand an argument that those violate privacy rights of the recipient. However, is this not an Internet standard in the IMAP protocols? If it's a standard, then it should be supported, regardless of our feelings about it.
Now let's get practical: It helps work flow to know whether a message you sent was read, deleted, accepted, or declined. If paper mail had the ability to notify you of its read status, that would have been offered by the USPS long ago. Yes, you're learning something about a private action by the recipient: what they did with the message you sent. But this is someone with whom you have a relationship, so the "privacy violation" of knowing what they did with your message, is offset by the benefit of knowing the status of the relationship. I think this is justified as long as it's optional on both ends: the sender has to explicitly request read status for this message, and the recipient has to choose to respond to read status requests (an automatic setting, not an explicit action for every message).
And the interface that works best is for the sender to return to the original message he sent and look at its status. That's exactly the GroupWise interface, and I think they got it right. The Zimbra (iCal?) approach of sending separate meeting accept/decline notices is very awkward to manage.
Just my two cents worth... Sande  |