How to capture success of sendmail function in other words: Delivery confirmation

Hello,

I have written a GUI application and one of the pushbuttons calls: sendmail function and sends out bunch of files to the specified recipeints. Now, it works fine. But some "brilliant" guy in my office (needless to say who) wants me to add few more lines in code so after success of event (in this case e-mail) a msgbox pops up: Hey, email delivered. So, I was just wondering if this is possible in Matlab.

p.s I know capture of exception etc is possible but delivery confirmation of e-mail....huh not so sure.

Thanks in advance. Arjun

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) does not offer any mechanism for proof of delivery to the end user. All it offers is the signal from the MTA (Mail Transfer Agent) that the message was accepted for delivery attempts. You can't really consider it delivered until at the very least it is successfully fetched by a MUA (Mail User Agent) -- but even then it could be sitting around unread.

Some MUA support generation of RR (Return Receipts). Those should be considered unreliable for a number of reasons. It is not uncommon for people to turn off generation of Return Receipts.

http://office.microsoft.com/en-ca/outlook-help/get-delivery-and-read-receipt-confirmations-HP010080428.aspx

[ArjunKothidar]

In short, I am screwed.