I reckon the correct way to handle these receipt requests is to configure the mail client to send a modified receipt email which also has a read receipt request, and keep replying in kind until your correspondent gets the message (or the mail servers break down due to two bots telling each other that they read the notification that they just read each other's mail telling them they read their mail, of course).
There must be someone at Next clothing (next.co.uk) dreaming that Apple sell that domain name to them one day.
mail.next.com goes to 127.0.0.6
As I recall, his reply was terse, along the lines of:
~~~
What are they?
sj
~~~
I was doubtful it was actually the man himself responding. I thought it was some email administrator trying to steal my ideas (I was 20yrs younger then). I proceeded cautiously and don't recall if he replied again.
A decade later I learned terse replies were his MO.
Like most every idea I came up with at the time, it had the word “smart” in it.
Smart Windows.
What are “Smart Windows”? So glad you asked. At the time both NeXTSTEP and MacOS only had resizing handles on the bottom of windows(if I remember correctly). What I proposed was a full perimeter border on windows like what was seen in the Motif Window Manager, CDE, et al.
But wait there’s more...
If you double-clicked the border, the window would jump-move in that direction until it hit either another window border or the edge of the screen. If you held the shift key while double-clicking the window would instead expand in that direction. All together it was a precise way to quickly move and arrange a full screen panel of windows without ever having to drag a window or window border.
I eventually tested out the idea on Windows NT 4.0 inside a Visual Basic project. It was super dope. SJ missed out.
Anyway, I sent whoever it was, pretty sure Steve, an email with read receipt enabled and he bitched me out for invading his privacy. This was ~93 or so.