A group of Alabama friends went deer hunting and paired off in twos for the day. That night, one of the hunters returned alone, staggering under the weight of an eight-point buck. 

"Where's Henry?" the others asked. "Henry had a stroke of some kind. He's a couple of miles back up the trail," the successful hunter replied. "You left Henry laying out there and carried the deer back?" they inquired. "A tough call," nodded the hunter. "But I figured no one is going to steal Henry!" 

The owner of a golf course in Georgia was confused about paying an invoice, so he decided to ask his secretary for some mathematical help. He called her into his office and said, "You graduated from the University of Georgia and I need some help. If I were to give you $20,000, minus 14%, how much would you take off?" 

The secretary thought a moment, and then replied, "Everything but my earrings." 

A senior at Louisiana was overheard saying ..... "When the end of the world comes, I hope to be in Louisiana." When asked why, he replied, "I'd rather be in Louisiana because everything happens in Louisiana 20 years later than in the rest of the civilized world." 

The young man from Mississippi came running into the store and said to his buddy, "Bubba , somebody just stole your pickup truck from the parking lot!" Bubba replied, "Did you see who it was?" The young man answered, "I couldn't tell, but I got the license number." 

A man in North Carolina had a flat tire, pulled off on the side of the road, and proceeded to put a bouquet of flowers in front of the car and one behind it. Then he got back in the car to wait. A passerby studied the scene as he drove by and was so curious he turned around and went back. He asked the fellow what the problem was. The man replied, "I have a flat tire." The passerby asked, "But what's with the flowers?" The man responded, "When you break down they tell you to put flares in the front and flares in the back. I never did understand it neither." 

A Tennessee State Trooper pulled over a pickup on I-65. The trooper asked, "Got any ID?" The driver replied, "Bout whut?" 

A Texas Sheriff pulled up next to a guy unloading garbage out of his pick-up and into a ditch. The Sheriff asked, "Why are you dumping garbage in the ditch? Don't you see that sign right there over your head." "Yep", he replied. "That's whah ah'm dumpin it heah, cause it says: 'Fine For Dumping Garbage'." 

A 911 dispatcher had to tell a woman how to unlock her car on Sunday.

A woman called Kissimmee police to say she was locked inside her car at the Walgreen's on John Young Parkway near Poinciana.

"My car will not start. I'm locked inside my car," the unidentified woman said. "Nothing electrical works. And it's getting very hot in here, and I'm not feeling well."

The dispatcher asked the woman if she was able to manually pull the lock up on the door.

The woman said she would try, and then, she said, "Yes, I got the door open."

The reason why is that it's an almost useless feature which gives people false assurances, always a bad thing:

1) It doesn't work when the receiving email client does not have an automatic service that sends a reply. (Not only Entourage - there are many, many other other email clients which don't reply.) Therefore, if you don't get a reply you may incorrectly think it wasn't received,

2) It doesn't tell you that the recipient read the message anyway, only that his email client received it. Therefore when you get the reply you may incorrectly believe that he read it when he hasn't.

So - bad both ways round. It's a really feeble protocol, and good that Entourage does not (pretend to) implement it. The fact that Outlook implements it is an indication that the Outlook developers, unlike the Entourage developers, seem to think that everybody else in the world uses Outlook, which they don't. The Entourage developers, being on a "minority" platform, know better, and are smarter in not implementing it. To be a bit fairer, the Outlook approach probably reflects the fact that, originally, back in Office 95 for PCs, Outlook was an extension of an earlier client that worked only as intranet - something you used only with other people on your own Exchange server. Outlook started life doing the same thing - there used to be two modes - one for "Workgroups" on an Exchange server, and another for "Internet".

There were some poor decisions made when Outlook was extended to the Internet, that shouldn't be there. This is one of them - it's inaccurate and unreliable, since it assumes that everyone can do it, which they can't. You're much better off just not using it, since it cannot be relied upon.

And that's why Entourage does not implement it.