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.

Answer 1

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"; 

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

(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.