Just to be sure we're on the same page, and there are lots of people
who will make this distinction, FreeBSD and Linux are not the same
product. FreeBSD is its own entity, based upon BSD, and Linux (or,
depending on your inclination, GNU/Linux) is a kernel and offered via
many distributions (Mandrake, Debian, Gentoo, RedHat, and others), the
distributions each having a set of interfaces and programs that add
value to the kernel.
FreeBSD is configured around a set of ports that are designed
specifically to run on FreeBSD. FreeBSD has an ability to run Linux
applications in a binary interface mode. Depending upon whom you ask,
the binary interface is roughly comparable to native FreeBSD binaries.
The reason I'm even getting to this point is to make sure that the
answer you seek is based upon appropriate information. Since I have to
assume you're using a vanilla install of FreeBSD (which release,
please?), then I would assume that your mail transfer program is
Sendmail. www.sendmail.org.
However, your mailer is probably the key to determining
responsiveness, not sendmail. The general best you can hope for is
that you ask for a delivery receipt in the mail and the recipient
agrees to respond in kind (Outlook defaults to send receive receipt.
Eudora defaults to ask you if you want to send a receipt).
I'd suggest reading http://rfc.giga.net.tw/rfc2298 regarding Message
Disposition Notification Requests to find out if you want to add that
overhead. MDN's are OK, but pay attention to this: "MDNs SHOULD NOT be
sent automatically if the address in the Disposition-Notification-To
header differs from the address in the Return-Path header."
It would be important to understand the implications of your
"Reply-To" being the greeting card sender, if the sender's email
address is blank or fake or different from how you attempt to obtain
your disposition (maybe you want the disposition to the sender, maybe
you want the disposition to yourself.)
So, that's one hint: disposition.
The other hint, which is less fumbling but more "work" on your side is
simply to see if the email is valid before send.
http://www.zend.com/zend/spotlight/ev12apr.php gives a very excellent
tutorial on how to test an email on the recipient's ISP.
So, there you have it. You can hope that the recipient can respond to
a disposition request and/or send to a validated address and hope that
the recipient isn't blocking your domain for spam or the sender or the
content (or the mailbox quota is full). Most of the recipient email
program side is outside your control. The email may be sent, but rules
wizard dumps it to "deleted items" immediately and you don't get
negative confirmation because it was sent and received.
Also consider that some errors may not even appear for 12 hours, due
to problems communicating with the host (although a lot of that can be
avoided by validating email before send).
Since we don't know what language (PHP, PERL, PYTHON, etc.) is being
used, the assistance this might have provided is still limited.
I still hope this free comment is useful to you. |
