and now for something completely different; that is, return receipts and delivery confirmations are completely different and independent features. they can each be selected by a message sender in the Delivery Options dialog:
delivery confirmations are a specific example of a class of status messages known as 'Delivery Status Notifications' (DSN). i've pulled down the list of 'Delivery report' choices above. 'Only on failure' is the default and it's self explanatory. 'Trace entire path' will cause each intermediate server 'hop' to send a trace message back to the sender. 'Confirm delivery' will cause the delivering server to send confirmation message back to the sender as soon as the message is safely deposited in the recipient's mail file.
return receipts, on the other hand, are emailed to the message sender when the recipient opens the message. i don't think that i'm telling secrets when i say that it's possible for recipients to figure out that a message has a return receipt requested and that there are Many Ways to prevent a return receipt from being sent back to the sender.
therefore, in the notes / domino world there's an important difference between return receipts and delivery confirmations: recipients can circumvent return receipts, but not delivery confirmations. when a message with a delivery confirmation request is delivered to a recipient's domino mail database, the domino mail router will always send a delivery confirmation back to the sender.
sending messages to the internet is another matter.
when domino transfers a message with a return receipt to the internet, the return receipt simply passes straight through as it's an attribute of the message. the recipients may still be able to choose whether to honor the return receipt request, but that depends on them and their mail clients.
when domino transfers a message with a delivery confirmation requested to the internet, the domino server has to figure out if it is configured for outbound DSNs and if the remote server supports DSNs. if so, then domino can transfer the message (and the request) and from there it's up to the subsequent server hops to do the right thing.
however, if the remote server does not support delivery confirmations, then domino immediately sends a message back to the sender indicating that domino transferred the message to the remote server, but noting that the remote server does not support DSNs. domino will also notify the sender if the domino server itself is not configured for outbound DSNs.
Outbound DSNs are configured in the server configuration, Router/SMTP page, Advanced page, Commands and Extensions page, under Outbound SMTP Commands and Extensions.
finally, the reason that the confirmations are appearing as 'delivery failure' reports, rather than 'delivery confirmation' report, is that the notes client or mail template has not been upgraded to 6.0.1 as well. both the client and the template should be upgraded.
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. . RE: Delivery Failure (~Jennifer Desve... 16.May.03) 
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