RPostal

Beyond Request Read Receipt in Gmail – Proof of Delivery, Content, and Timestamp

For important email, where delivery, content or timestamps may be questioned in the future, using Gmail request read receipt features or Gmail apps to track email opens is not good enough.

Registered Email™ certified e-delivery services track delivery and message opening regardless of recipient or system settings and provide an audit trail forensic record that can authenticate content and uniform timestamps — regardless of recipient settings, software, or actions.

By contrast, using Gmail or G-Suite to request read receipt or delivery receipt setting to request a read receipt does not usually provide information to the sender for external Internet recipients. These settings simply create a pop-up for the recipient – if they also have a compliant email program and have not disabled this capability – that asks the recipient to let the sender know they opened the email.

Most external recipients disable these read receipt requests and the feature is rendered useless. Even if they do return a read receipt, (a) the receipt tells nothing about message content, (b) the times are based on the sender’s computer and are not uniform, and (c) the format is simple text, which can be modified and is not an authenticatable record proving delivery plus content delivered.

An email sent as a Registered Email™ message returns a Registered Receipt™ email proof of delivery record for the sender, regardless of recipient actions, settings, or software.

Reliance on bounce notices provides a false sense of security, as most recipient servers turn off bounce notices due to “Directory Harvest Attacks” and “Backscatter Blacklisting” concerns. So senders who do NOT receive a bounce notice cannot rely on that to demonstrate successful delivery.

Contact our integration team to learn more about how you can add Registered Email™, RMail, and RSign services to your workflows.