Patent US 5,675,733

A confirmation of delivery message display enhancement provides user definable correlation and/or statistical summaries of numerous confirmation of delivery (COD) acknowledgement messages corresponding to requested, automatically generated acknowledgements of receipt of electronic mail messages. The format of the multimedia display is user-definable and selectively provides detail information with expanded icons or overlaid windows. Performance of user specified or default processing of COD information is initiated by receipt of each COD message by the sender and the resulting summary and correlation is displayed at the will of the operator. Animation of display templates is also provided to assist in understanding of patterns of COD messages. A preferred embodiment includes transmission of user-defined information with a message (or local storage thereof) which is accumulated when the information is returned with (or locally accessed in response to) a COD message.