Lynne concluded with, in part..
> Thanks for all the ideas on how to do this and Eric has
> hit the "why" squarely on the noggin'.  We want to be
> able to say with certainty "you GOT your notice of
> registration dates, financial aid, etc".  Yes, it's a
> legal "cya" and Yes, the students could and do delete
> before reading, but we know they received the notification.

I don't understand "it's a legal "cya"", but I'll comment anyway...

I would argue, and perhaps testify, that you can't know with certainty.

You can perhaps be fairly confident that you sent a piece of e-mail, but that doesn't mean the
recipient received it. Any number of things can happen to it.  You can determine many of the non-
deliveries by turning off LISTSERV's automatic bounce processing.  You can determine some by
watching at the address in the message "From:" field.  Other, less obvious addresses also might
receive a bounce message.

However, sometimes the message is simply not delivered and no bounce is returned.   I'm
reminded of e-mail I received from one of my campuses a few weeks ago.  Paraphrasing, it said
"If you were expecting e-mail yesterday and didn't receive it, please ask the sender to send it
again. We had an outage (yesterday) that we think resulted in about 11,000 pieces of incoming or
outgoing e-mail to be deleted".

But what I view as "confident" doesn't matter ... what your institution and the legal system probably
matters much more. :-)  Following legally established procedures wrt postal mail results in
"delivery".  I'm not aware of any such procedures for e-mail, and I hope none are imposed on our
current (SMTP-based) e-mail system.  We need a new system for securely and confidently
delivering e-mail!

cheers, wayne

Wayne T. Smith                       mailto:[log in to unmask]
Systems Group - UNET                 University of Maine System