Is there a way to determine whether an e-mail reaches its destination?

Question

I have a PHP script that sends out critical e-mails that needs to reach its destination. I know how to check whether the e-mail sent successfully, the only issue is knowing

Answer 1

Delivery Status Notification is the usual way: http://www.sendmail.org/~ca/email/dsn.html

You can't tell if an email is read unless you use that microsoft email thing and the reader has not disabled read receipts.

Edit: I haven't progressed to HTML email yet so I never considered that for a read notification.