Entourage Read Receipt 1.0b1

Ever sent an email and wondered if it arrived? In this age of dodgy spam filters and abandoned email addresses, the disappearance of emails is a growing problem. Wouldn’t it be good if there were some way of finding out?

Fortunately, some clever people have already thought of a solution: the Disposition-Notification-To (DNT) email header. What does this do? If you add this, invisibly, to your email message, any compliant email program will send you back an email to tell you the message has been received or read.

Note the word ‘compliant’ there. Unfortunately, Entourage X and 2004 – unlike their Windows-based cousin, Outlook – don’t have a facility for easily adding the DNT header to email messages, although you can configure any of your email accounts to add the header to every message you send out; they also ignore requests for ‘read receipts’ in any incoming emails.

This is where this package of scripts comes in. Included is a script for detecting the DNT header in incoming messages and sending back a standards-compliant read receipt that includes both human and machine-readable notifications that you’ve received the message.

There are also two scripts for adding the DNT header to your own outgoing messages: one that simply toggles the header on and off for each of your email accounts (if the account already has the DNT header it’s removed, without affecting any other headers you might have; if the account doesn’t yet have the DNT header, it’s added); and one that allows you to pick which accounts you want the headers added to.