Where would you like to be notified when an Email comes?
There are a lot of ways to notify you like sending a text message to your phone or (if you use a smart phone) get a notification in the phone that there is new mail for you.
For text messages, there are services that provides that since it does involve some money because the cellular providers don't give free access for anyone to send text messages.
There are various client software for your computer which will alert you of new Emails (if you have Google Talk installed, for example, it will send you notifications when you have a new Email in your Gmail box).
Regarding getting a notification when a message that you sent was read by the recipient. There is a standard for that, but, unfortunately, not all Email providers implement it so if your Email client do provide the ability to request a notification when an Email was read, you might not get it if the other side doesn't respect that request (either by selecting to not send these messages or that the email provider doesn't supply this functionality).
So, the technology do offer it, its the different implementations that decides if whether to implement it or not.
