Turn On Email “Read Status” Tracking For Your Organization In Exchange 2010…

All of us are familiar with turning on “read receipt” and “delivery receipt” while composing an important message to make sure that the message has been delivered & read by the recipients.

Though this option was useful to some extend in knowing whether the email was read, recipients could always deny sending “read receipt” to the sender.

With Exchange 2010, you can turn on this feature globally, which means that all emails flowing in your organization can be checked for it’s “read status”. The good thing is that the sender can do it him/herself. Let me explain the feature in action.

By default, the feature is disabled. This is the case in both Exchange 2010 & SP1. To check the current configuration, run Get-OrganizationConfig | fl read*

To turn on the feature, run Set-OrganizationConfig –ReadTrackingEnabled $true

Now that the feature is turned on, let me send an email from my account (Rajith) to a test account that I have created (Raj Test). To check the status of the message, right click the message from the Sent Items & click “Open Delivery Report” (in OWA).

To do the same in Outlook 2010, open the email, go to File –> Open Delivery Report.

My delivery report to the test user shows that the email was submitted & delivered, but not read yet.

Once the email gets read, the delivery report reflects the same.

This stops the normal excuse we hear when we don’t get a timely response for a sent email - “I haven’t seen your email”…