Email tracking technique created

The internet engineering community is at the final stages of creating a new technique for tracking emails.

Already under development for five years, the Message Tracking Query Protocol (MTQP) allows email senders to track their messages and establish their delivery routes.

Tony Hansen, a principal technical staff member with AT&T Labs, one of the companies involved in the protocol's design, said: "You would be able to track the message in a way that is similar to how a package sent via UPS or FedEx can be tracked on the web." Senders would also be able to receive notification that their messages have been received by the recipients, he said.

Engineers at AT&T Labs, Sendmail and MessagingDirect designed the protocol through a working group of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Draft documents are currently being written with help from working group company members including Netscape, Lotus, IBM, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems.

According to Hansen, the protocol is similar to the web-based POP3 mail protocol. "It is extremely simple, consisting of only a few verbs with arguments and their responses. And like POP3, it is completely text based."

The protocol also includes the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), which provides the necessary information to track messages. It also allows senders' email systems to go to the site where messages were first sent as part of their delivery route to establish whether the emails were received and to monitor their next destinations.

The IETF working group has written four documents that outline the SMTP extension and the MTQP. One document is in 'last call', the final step before being published as a Request for Comments. The other three documents will be sent to last call in a month or two.