I don't know of an automated way to do this. It would require being able to determine to which messages you require a response.

Manually, you can tag messages to which you expect you need a response. tagged messages can be filtered or searched. But afaik there is still not a good method to determine whether such a message has a response.

I guess I was hoping for a plug-in that might achieve this. Gmail seems to have a number of solutions, but the only cost effective solution for Thunderbird that I can find is whoreadme.com.

Umm…

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Tue, 08 Apr 2014 11:20:10 GMT

Sure this is still in business?

It appears that they reformat your message to include a web bug. I think that's a bit devious and underhand and if I thought someone was using it in their correspondence with me, I'd take fairly trivial measures to thwart it.

Thanks for your reply. I understand that email tracking can be deemed unethical. The only reason that I wanted to implement something is because I'm not sure whether my emails are landing in people's inboxes or junk folders. I know of a small handful of occasions where the email has ended up in the recipient's junk folder, and so not been read.

My business relies on the exchange of emails, and so having a delivery report or way to see whether it's been read would at least remove any doubt in my mind. In all honesty, I don't mind whether it's been read or not, just that it's landed in the recipient's inbox, that way I know that there are no delivery issues, which I have very little control over.

A good tool for that would be Delivery Status Notification, which requests servers to notify the sender when they handle a message, and this would be capable of reassuring you that it had got to the recipient's mailbox.

Unfortunately, it is exceedingly rare to find a server that supports this feature. The perception is that spammers could use such a service to discover live and working email addresses and therefore target these addresses. (I don't quite follow this argument as spammers don't send from their own computers and wouldn't get the notification anyway.) Therefore the vast majority of email providers disable this function on their servers.

Given your needs, you are probably going to have to find a service like the one you have previously identified. This isn't something that an email client can do by itself; it needs some feedback from other elements in the email chain.

Hi Zenos, thanks for your informative reply. Gmail seems to have many more options for some sort of 'read by recipient' notification, but I also wondered whether using G Suite for Business or a paid Outlook 365 account, rather webmail via Thunderbird, would be a better bet for lessening the risk of emails ending up in junk folders.

Thunderbird has read receipts. Which I think you are talking about.

Right click one of the account names in the folder pane on the left and select settings. Pick Return receipts from from the account in the accounts list and set up what you want. Be aware Thunderbird's default behavior when a read receipt is requested is to ask the recipient if they actually want to send one. Other mail clients vary from forced sending (Microsoft Exchange) to simply ignoring the requested receipt flag (Lots of web mail applications) with all kinds of user settings in between.

Thanks, I'll look into it now.