Earlier quoted context omitted.
Didn't Steve have an email that was in your mailbox by default when you got a new account on a NeXT machine? It had some embedded images and an audio file of him talking. 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.
Honestly I find read receipt requests to be in very poor taste, if not a sign of outright hostility, and no, having them by default is not an acceptable excuse, no more than forgetting capslock on would.
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).