Outlook 97 return receipt question

[babylon5guy]

Hi,
Is there a way to look at an email that has been sent to you with return receipt turned on, and not notify the sender you looked at it? At home Zone Alarm blocks it but my office firewall does not. I think it is up to me whether a person knows I read their email or not.
TIA

[Tuf]

I don't remeber if the option was available in 97 or not. But you may be able to turn off returning read reciepts. If not almost every utility made for outlook has this capability. I used to use a couple of different utilities with outlook in a corporate environment. One was out tray and the other was watch your back. In most circles sending read receipts is considered rude. I think it was watch your back that had some interesting features that I never tried. One would simply hang on to the reciept until you gave permission to return it. The other would allow you to send multiple copies from 2 to several hundred copies back to the sender. I guess that would let them know you don't like it. And you can deny that you know anything about it. I always just told people not to send me mail with reciepts or don't get your feelings hurt if I don't open it until I know I have time to deal with it.

[dldz]

I have used Watch Your Back (http://www.grinningshark.com/WatchYourBack.htm#Other) before, and it comes in pretty handy. And it's only $12 for 1 user. free 30 day D/L.
HTH, Don

[Statica]

With OE at least you can be notified first that a ReadReceipt has been asked for, and you can decline sending the receipt.

Often times, its the server that sends the receipts on change of disposition of a mail. Of course it wont be an exchange server

[babylon5guy]

Thanks guys, I'll try your suggestions. This has really been bugging me. I sent a couple of emails to myself with return receipt from work and I notice zone alarm did not block them when I got home and opened them. The server at work must do something different. I will be looking at those programs you mentioned. Where in OE can you switch on notify readreceipt has been asked for?
TIA

[Statica]

In OE
Tools > Options > Receipts > Returning Read Receipts
Selecting the option Notify me for each read receipt request, will popup a question that the sender has requested a Read Receipt, if you wish to send a receipt say YES if not NO.

For notifications there are MDN's or Message Disposition Notifications - this actually tells the status of your notifications, and DSN's Delivery Service Notifications. With DSN, it's actually a rather useful feature where the mail server simply responds with an acknowledgement that a mail sent has reached the intended mailbox - this however is not proof that the mail was openned or read or deleted etc etc. With MDN, the server has the ability to report back to the sender with a notification when the disposition of the mail has changed ie. from UNread to read.

Ask your system admin at work to configure the MTA (mail transport agent) correctly if a significant portion of the ppl at your work find the Read-Recpt annoying. Its a simple setting, and s/he should be able to accomodate you. Sometimes your MUA (mail user agent), might take it upon itself to respond to such headers automatically, again its a simple setting. The wonder of it all is that a Micro$oft product actually gives you a choice in something :)
At least you could tell your sysadmin to configure the receipt notification with a bit more guile - ie. my servers respond with an explicit message to the tune of - that its just a notification of delivery to appropriate mailbox, and it is NOT a notification that the mail was read or understood ;)

I agree, its a dang nuisance, and to top it all off it becomes wasted resources when you have a server responding.

[babylon5guy]

Thanks Statica, that option is not available in Outlook 98 that I can see. I'm trying that "Watch Your Back" that Don and Tuf recommended and it works well on what it does. It still doesn't block what you were mentioning when the sender gets notified it was delivered. WYB said it was working on this feature but is very difficult because by the time it gets to your mailbox the server has already sent the notification to the sender. WYB does allow you to read the mail note without notifying the sender that you did, then lets you send the verification that you deleted it without reading it, that's pretty neat. Although most of the time I just don't want the notification sent. WYB said they were also working on you being able to read the BCC field, that would be really neat, that is another thing that bugs me. I feel when someone sends me something, it's mine and none of their buisness what I do with it, and I don't like the idea of other people knowing either. Don't get me wrong if it pertains to work a lot of times it is fine. But a lot of this is personal and people playing games and I don't want to play!