Thanks Brian, I see it now. "Request an email when your card has been viewed" doh! I've been fiddling so much with the other end of them that I didn't even change the color settings when sending my test cards or anything below that. I promise I'll do better to look more thoroughly before taking up your time.
I still would like to see notification of receipt in the admin cp so that I don't accidentally delete a card that someone hasn't picked up yet. But there's no great hurry. Maybe for vbGallery 6.0 or something.