How To Get MobileMe to Notify You When the Receiver Reads an Email

Posted 11/05/2010 at 2:20pm | by Susie Ochs

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Can Apple Mail notify me when an email I sent has been opened by the receiver? I’m using MobileMe.

What you’re after is called a “read receipt.” You can have Mail request a read receipt when your email recipients open your message, but it requires a Terminal command. Launch Terminal and type the following exactly as shown, then press Return. Just replace user@domain.com with your own email address:

defaults write com.apple.mail UserHeaders ‘{“Disposition-Notification-To” = “user@domain.com”; }’

But realize before you do this that it might not work so great. Some email clients don’t respect read-receipt requests and won’t honor them--Mail is actually one of those. If someone emails you a message that contains a read-receipt request, Mail will ignore the request; you’ll still see the email, but the sender won’t get a read receipt back showing you looked at it. And even if your recipients aren’t using Mail, many other email clients have a setting to ignore read-receipt requests, and it’s a popular setting to use for privacy concerns. Otherwise it’s too easy for spammers to attach a read-receipt request to all their junk emails and have an easy way of telling which email addresses they’re spamming are valid by just logging the read receipts. So while Mail can make the request for you, you can’t rely on actually getting the read receipts back. You might never see one.

So to disable the Terminal request above and stop Mail from requesting a read receipt with every email you send, type this command into the Terminal and press Return:

defaults delete com.apple.mail UserHeaders