Why does Mail not support read receipts?

Question

I find it hard to believe that there is a single email application that doesn't support read receipts. For me it is a fairly basic feature I would expect any decent Mail application to have.
I am currently in the process of writing an email to a company and I want to make sure they get it - a read receipt is how I want to verify that they've had it. Why does Mail not support this?
If I am going to have to accept that Mail is not the first class application Apple keeps parading around - is there an alternative that offers this and other features I would expect to find in Microsoft Outlook (minus the calendar etc...)?

Answer 1

Outlook uses a Microsoft-proprietary system for "read receipts", so there may be no way Apple could implement it, or there may be licensing fees involved, or Apple may just not feel that it's worth spending the money to implement. Outlook which is designed to work primarily with an Exchange server, so it's in Microsoft's interest to support Exchange features (note that even Microsoft in their own Mac app do not support all the features theydo on Windows).
You can express your interest in this feature to Apple via their feedback pages, if you wish:
http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html
but support for return receipts in any system other than Exchange is very unlikely, since as Matt said it is not part of the Internet email specification and hence not widely supported at all.
Regards.