Parse Bounced Email (delivery-report) and Read Receipt


Read Receipt

Some e-mail applications, such as Microsoft Office Outlook, employ a read-receipt tracking mechanism. A sender selects the receipt request option prior to sending the message. Upon opening the email, each recipient has the option of notifying the sender that the message was opened and read.

However, there is no guarantee that you will get a read-receipt. Some possible reason are that very few e-mail applications or services support read receipts, or simply because users disable the functionality. Those do support read-receipt aren't necessarily compatible with or capable of recognizing requests from a different e-mail service or application

Delivery Receipt and FailureReport

It is also called a DSN (delivery service notification), which is a request to the recipient’s email server to send you a notification about the delivery of an email you've just sent. The notification takes the form of an email, and will tell you if your delivery succeeded (Delivery Receipt), failed, got delayed (Failure Report).

Parse Report

For many email campaign applications, the very important task is detecting if the email is received by recipient or not. Parsing the delivery report is the common way to get the email status. EAGetMail .NET class provides a built-in function (GetReport) to parse the report. The following sample demonstrates how to parse the delivery-report.

If ReporType is DeliveryReceipt or ReadReceipt, the report probably has only OriginalSender, OriginalRecipient and OriginalMessageID information in the report, it depends on the mail server that generated the report.

Example

[Visual Basic, C#] The following example demonstrates how to parse the delivery report with EAGetMail POP3 & IMAP4 .NET Component. To get the full samples of EAGetMail, please refer to Samples section.

[Visual Basic]
Imports EAGetMail

Public Sub ParseReport(ByVal emlFile As String)
    Dim oMail As New Mail("TryIt")
    oMail.Load(emlFile, False)

    If Not oMail.IsReport Then
        Console.WriteLine("This is not a delivery report.")
        Exit Sub
    End If

    Dim oReport As MailReport = oMail.GetReport()
    Select (oReport.ReportType)
        Case DeliveryReportType.DeliveryReceipt
            Console.WriteLine("This is a delivery receipt!")
        Case DeliveryReportType.ReadReceipt
            Console.WriteLine("This is a read receipt!")

        Case Else
            Console.WriteLine("This is a failure report!")
    End Select

    Console.WriteLine("OriginalSender: {0}", oReport.OriginalSender)
    Console.WriteLine("OriginalRecipient: {0}", oReport.OriginalRecipient)
    Console.WriteLine("OriginalMessageID: {0}", oReport.OriginalMessageID)

    If oReport.ReportType = DeliveryReportType.FailureReport Then
        Console.WriteLine("ErrCode: {0}", oReport.ErrCode)
        Console.WriteLine("ErrDescription: {0}", oReport.ErrDescription)
        Console.WriteLine("OriginalSubject: {0}", oReport.OriginalSubject)
        Console.WriteLine("ReportMTA: {0}", oReport.ReportMTA)
        Console.WriteLine(oReport.OriginalHeaders.ToString())
    End If
End Sub
    
[C#]
using System;
using System.Collections;
using EAGetMail;

public void ParseReport(string emlFile)
{
    Mail oMail = new Mail("TryIt");
    oMail.Load(emlFile, false);

    if (!oMail.IsReport)
    {
        Console.WriteLine("This is not a delivery report.");
        return;
    }

    MailReport oReport = oMail.GetReport();
    switch (oReport.ReportType)
    { 
        case DeliveryReportType.DeliveryReceipt:
            Console.WriteLine( "This is a delivery receipt!" );
            break;
        case DeliveryReportType.ReadReceipt:
            Console.WriteLine( "This is a read receipt!" );
            break;
        default:
            Console.WriteLine( "This is a failure report!" );
            break;
    }

    Console.WriteLine( "OriginalSender: {0}", oReport.OriginalSender );
    Console.WriteLine( "OriginalRecipient: {0}", oReport.OriginalRecipient );
    Console.WriteLine( "OriginalMessageID: {0}", oReport.OriginalMessageID );

    if( oReport.ReportType == DeliveryReportType.FailureReport  )
    {
        Console.WriteLine( "ErrCode: {0}", oReport.ErrCode );
        Console.WriteLine("ErrDescription: {0}", oReport.ErrDescription);
        Console.WriteLine( "OriginalSubject: {0}", oReport.OriginalSubject  );
        Console.WriteLine( "ReportMTA: {0}", oReport.ReportMTA );
        Console.WriteLine( oReport.OriginalHeaders.ToString());
    }
}

See Also

Using EAGetMail POP3 & IMAP4 Component
User Authentication and SSL Connection
Digital Signature and E-mail Encryption/Decryption
Unique Identifier (UIDL) in POP3 and IMAP4 protocol
Work with winmail.dat (TNEF Parser)
EAGetMail .NET Namespace References
EAGetMail POP3 & IMAP4 Component Samples