With a thumbs-up I know they've read it, and that's worth quiet a bit in this asynchronous communication world of ours.

We used to (and I believe still) have Read Receipts for this.

Read Receipts are invasive, because they signal when I read it - which might well not be when I want to reply. I could read an email today and then decide I'll reply tomorrow or next Wednesday, because reasons; but the sender will see the read receipt and just assume I hate their guts for not replying immediately to the Most Important Person In The World (i.e. them).

So I turn them off as a matter of routine on all my accounts.

read receipts just mean you opened the message, not that you actually read it. It's a terrible misnomer.

Yes! +1 And it's possible to disable Read Receipts and a lot of people do. A lot of people mangle beacon pixels too.

Oh yeah, the thing I always turn off or filter out because the last thing I need is another way spies and hackers and ad men can track every waking moment of my life.

That was another groupware feature that was great for small orgs and terrible for the general net.

The distance between "not detectable" and "detectable" is vast and significant, no matter how minute the unit of measurement.

I suppose it'd be OK if the other side of your TCP connections stopped sending ACKs.

This is cute, but not how email communication works. There's no need for explicit answer to any email, otherwise people would never stop responding.

> not how email communication works. There's no need for explicit answer to any email

Obviously context dependent. For time-sensitive emails, it’s common to follow up with a call if receipt isn’t acknowledged.

Be sure to CC everybody. /s No. The technology isn't built for this.

I'm pretty sure a large number of e-mail conversations (i.e. not just announcements) end in one person saying, "OK", "Will do", "See you then", "I'm too busy, sorry" or some such response. It's very uncommon to send out an e-mail to someone and ask them to do something or consider something and then assume it has been received without acknowledgement.

Email is used for a lot of things. It could be used as a message broker in batch processing systems. /s (Seriously, there are MIME types for that.)

I'm being surrounded right now by examples in multiple domains where it is clear that the moral of the story is that one person taking an action is different than a company packaging that action up and selling it as a solution to a general problem. This seems to be a lesson which needs to be generally remembered, explored, and learned. Again.

While one person responding "will do!" is appropriate 1:1, it is typically not appropriate to /reply all/ when doing it or to reply to a distribution list when doing it. I mean there are exceptions to everything: "Reply 'will do!' to this all-staff@ message or you're fired." But generally it's a meme, an anti-pattern (and there, I did it again).

Many people have built autoreply systems for email to respond with helpful advice to frequent topics. (Happy to help, I've done it before.) Similarly email clients (MUAs) which have macro / scripting capabilities for filtering or replying are not new.

What's new here? If it can be called new, it's that somebody provided that macro capability and linked it to an optional email header the sender can provide which enables / disables the ability to run macros in the client. In theory; or something. We (or at least I) don't know if it's possible to add your own macros.

I imagine this comes with tools in the client or in alias management to manage "reply all" / "me too": in other words it might be possible for someone to disable macros when responding to messages sent to all-staff@. I expect other extensions which reach across boundaries of control to follow if this one floats, and that's why I consider it a shitshow.

“Please let me know if you were able to read this attachment.”

Really?

ACK is required for TCP to work, reply is not for email.