In general, it is not possible to tell if someone has received a mail
message that you send.  How can you tell if you drop a letter in the US
Mailbox whether it was received?  You just have to wait for a response. 

First of all, asking the person to send you back a confirmation is probably
the surest way. 

At some hosts (not athena!) when you finger a user there is a message
saying when the last mail was received and when the user read mail last.
That might be one thing to check. 

Sometimes adding the following line to the header of the message works too:

        Return-receipt-to:  username@mit.edu

If you add this line under the "To:" line in the message, some mailers will
mail you back a confirmation that the message was received. 
MIT does not support this function,  therefore it will not work for mail being
sent to normal athena accounts.

You can also check if a message was sent.  To do that, log in on the
workstation from which you sent the mail and do this from your athena%
prompt:

         tail -50 /usr/spool/mqueue/syslog |more

Look for the date on which you sent the mail.  You'll see lines with a date
in them, and "to=" and "from=" fields.  Look for the\ line that seems to be
your message and see if it ends with the word "Sent".  If it does, it means
that the message was sent from that workstation to the athena mail hub. In
that case, the mail message was probably sent.  (The athena mail hub is
very reliable.) There is no guarantee, though, that the message was
received.  The UUCP mail network is the least reliable, and the internet is
the most reliable, but there are no absolute guarantees.  It's also
possible that the recipient might not log on for a long time!

The best way to find out if a message was received is to ask, in the text
of the message, for a response. 


last updated: 6/30/95