I just love hearing “oh sorry, I didn’t get your email” as a response when I ask someone for a response for the third time. Especially when I know that person has a BlackBerry. When it’s from users on my BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) I usually just create a help desk ticket from their “oh I didn’t get your email” response, and then attach a screen shot of the BES log showing that it was in fact delivered to their BlackBerry.

Then they forget that I can do this, and in a few weeks I have to repeat the whole thing. But what do you do when the person you’re sending email to doesn’t have a BES, or is not on your network?

Apparently the good folks at RIM are one step ahead of me, as they have a solution to this nonsense built in. Keeping in mind that this will only work with actual BlackBerry devices (I’ve confirmed that it works with a BES server, and using the BlackBerry Redirector for peeps without a BES), send a email to the address that gets delivered to the BlackBerry with <confirm> as the subject, and in a few moments you should get a reply that looks something like this:

As you’ll see in the screen shot, you can use this functionality with an actual subject, or by sending just <confirm> as the subject (just make sure that <confirm> is the first thing on the subject line). The really awesome part of this is that unless the recipient knows what the <confirm> tag in the subject line does, they have no idea that you now know that the email was delivered to their device. Take note smarmy sales weasels: I see what you did there.

Check out more from our Joe at his blog Joe-IT here.