Introduction:
Importance of email doesn't need any definition.
With the rapid growth of Internet, we are working with forests of servers, as datacenters; there are servers which are directly managed by many less experience system administrators or many times even datacenters that are not good enough.
With the growing business and generation the load on email servers have also increased, the requirement of experienced mail server administrator the processing Power of Servers, and the quality of system administrator have reduced significantly due to high volume of requirement and many other reasons.
Many users of email are facing a new problem of non-delivery of email due to various reasons.
When referencing the term “non-delivery”, is a little unclear or misleading. In particular, when delivering a message to a recipient's computer system, there is an acknowledgment that is issued to the sender. In normal circumstances, if no acknowledgment is issued it means that the email has not been delivered. (Vaudreuil, 2004). In some cases, a non-delivery report (NDR) is issued to the sender.
Many users of email are facing a new problem of non-delivery of email due to various reasons. The reasons normally include:
Delivery of emails is very much important due to the importance and trust level of the medium. Email Delivery Confirmation is not specifically mentioned in any Email related RFC like (5322, 5321).To provide this facility, some email clients like Microsoft Outlook /Outlook express or Eudora use their own way to provide email delivery receipt: they generate an automated email to every flagged email that requires "read receipt" flag or "delivery flag". However both of the ways depend on the email client.
If the recipient and sender email client are same, then their email delivery/receipt system works. However cross client methods do not work as expected.
Another approach is to add some sort of third-party link, image, or page that is called whenever the email is displayed on client internet enabled machine, the approach doesn't works if the GUI of client blocks third-party web calls, hence the sender server doesn't gets updated.
In Either way, the sender is still in doubt if the email is arrived or read on the client console.
Many Time due to communication failure or due to network problem, the email delivery failure reports are not sent to the sender, however it seems to the sender that email is sent (when is not returned) so it must have delivered.
In the above scenario of uncertainty the need of a perfect email delivery /status system is required.
Pros and cons:
Spammers and delivery reports:While being able to be notified on the status of the email delivered to the recipient is extremely useful, but it could help spammers to do their job better. If a spam email has been opened by the recipients, the spammer could get notified and keep sending spam to the same recipients. Spammers could then have an idea on what emails are being read most by the internet users, and what subjects for the spam is more effective.
References
T. Hansen & G. Vaudreuil (editors). Message Disposition Notification. , May 2004.
K. Moore. Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) Service Extension for Delivery Status Notifications (DSNs). , January 2003.
Amin Jalali 0463RORO1108
