Some might dread the feature of “read notifications” supported by certain MUAs; some call it an “invasion of privacy”; and yet, it can also be useful in certain situations:
When a message is read or seen in a MUA supporting this extension, the programme emits a notification back to the sender saying something along the lines of “your message … was read on …”. This is good to know, especially in times when you cannot wait for the failed-delivery-notification that follows four to five days of unsuccessful (but furious) attempts of some delivery agent, assuming it doesn’t get trashed as spam.
Such a read notification is logically a reply to the original message, isn’t it?
The RFC 680
proposed in April 1975 defines the header References
as a way to point to “other correspondence which this message
references”. This header, along with In-Reply-To
(defined in the same RFC), is commonly used in every-day mail
traffic to refer to previously exchanged messages, and enables mail
readers to thread separate messages together into coherent
conversations (it takes a human to remove the coherence, the
technical aspect is infallible).
Cut.
Microsoft was also founded in April 1975, and it took them 20 years to barely manage to squeeze through the Internet door without the proverbial foot in it. They published a browser and several e-mail programmes, and it always appeared as if they tiredlessly tried to be different from the rest, attempting to form a clique of users, a Microsoft league in which to increase their revenue through network effects. Sounds bad, is bad, but yet again, they managed, through unimaginable feats of entrepreneurial genius and ruthless behaviour.
Cut.
In 1982, STD11 declared
the aforementioned In-Reply-To and
References headers as standards. At that time,
Microsoft software didn’t even know what a computer network
was.
Cut.
Does it come as a surprise that read notifications sent by Microsoft e-mail programmes, such as Microsoft Outlook do not make use of either of these standard headers to tag read notifications they send?
Instead, Microsoft pushes Thread-Topic and
Thread-Index, which are undocumented and thus probably
only work in a Microsoft-only context.
How am I supposed to assume anything else than Microsoft actively trying to oppose standards.
Anyone who boycotts standards is hindering progress and should be left behind. It’s good to see that the Internet society seems to follow that trend more and more.
Update: I found a way to extract the data to
recreate the In-Reply-To with
procmail. I don’t see a way to do the same for the
References header. Also, I’ve only verified that this
works for message disposition notifications from Outlook 2003,
although I expect it to work for other, similarly crippled MUAs
too.
