PHP email Headers - delivery option

Question

I've added the following code to our PHP Mail app which sends out emails:

$email_header .= "Disposition-Notification-To: $from"; 
$email_header .= "X-Confirm-Reading-To: $from";

However, we are not receiving any 'Delivered' or 'Read' confirmations.

Any thoughts?

Thanks,

H.

The recipient's mail client decides whether to send confirmations of read and receipt. Most (wisely) choose not to. — George Cummins, Feb 15 '12 at 19:42
Send an email to yourself, then use your client to check the headers. Do you see them? — james.garriss, Feb 21 '13 at 13:48

Mike · Accepted Answer · 2015-09-16T19:10:54.987

5

The reason that you are not receiving any confirmations is that most people choose not to send read receipts. If you could, from your server, influence whether or not this happened, a spammer could easily identify active and inactive email addresses quite easily.

However, another reason why this might be failing, if sending read receipts is enabled, is that you need to include a new line at the end of every line:

$email_header .= "Disposition-Notification-To: $from\r\n"; 
$email_header .= "X-Confirm-Reading-To: $from\r\n";

edited Sep 16 '15 at 19:10

answered Feb 15 '12 at 19:49

Mike

23,542
14
76
87

1

Line breaks in email headers should be `\r\n`, not just `\n`. – Synchro Sep 16 '15 at 15:00
1

@Synchro According to [RFC 2822](http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2822.html) you're absolutely right . I've updated my answer. – Mike Sep 16 '15 at 19:12

Ashley Strout · Answer 2 · 2013-02-21T17:37:32.670

1

I believe one header for getting read notifications was Return-Receipt-To:. Also, users usually have the option to ignore the "read receipt", and not send the e-mail back, if the header is not ignored completely by the client.

edited Feb 21 '13 at 17:37

answered Feb 15 '12 at 19:44

Ashley Strout

6,107
5
25
45

OP has the right header, per this RFC: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3798#section-2.1 – james.garriss Feb 21 '13 at 13:47
Hmm, well, turns out that there is a non-standard by that name, which is supported by some systems. Downvote removed. Rats, it won't let me change my vote. Sorry. – james.garriss Feb 21 '13 at 13:54
I edited the answer, so you should be allowed to change the vote – Ashley Strout Feb 21 '13 at 17:37
1

Done. And it turns out that there are several other non-standard headers for read receipt requests: `Read-Receipt-To`, `Return-Receipt-Requested`, `X-Confirm-Reading-To`, and `Generate-Delivery-Report`. – james.garriss Feb 21 '13 at 17:51

score -1 · Answer 3 · answered Feb 15 '12 at 19:48

(maybe not the answer to the question, but the probable answer to what you are trying to achieve is). Your method won't work most of the times as confirmations are usually disabled. Use a image tag to record the email reads in the email. It won't work if the loading of images is disabled.

PHP email Headers - delivery option

3 Answers3