Exchange ReadTrackingEnabled

As I have said before, I work with a great bunch of folks who possess, and daily exhibit, some deep skills.  Here is a sample email that went flying by the other day.

Background:  Jim Coan (Principal Consulting Engineer) and Vitaliy Mednik (Senior Consulting Engineer) are on CDW’s Microsoft Unified Communications team out of the Detroit area.  If I need help, these are two of the people to whom I turn for assistance. 

This is what Jim said at the bottom of his email:  “Considering this the frequency I’ve been asked about this I figured I’d share with the team.  I always get gripes when migrating from GroupWise to Exchange about this.”  Personally, I have not done a GroupWise migration in several years  - Jim seems to get stuck with them sandwiched between his other work. 

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I’ve been asked more than a few times if there was a way to find out if a user has read/opened an email on Exchange.  My standard answer was that we can track mail flow to delivery and also to use message tracking when sending the message itself.  This was not an acceptable answer for the client I am currently working with so I did some extra digging and with a nudge in the right direction from our good friend Vitaliy Mednik I found this little jewel inside Set-OrganizationConfig called –ReadTrackingEnabled.  What this does in essence is turn on read receipts for everything in the organization.  It doesn’t replace read receipts, so users can still have that at their disposal, it is really more of a server side read receipt that can’t be canceled like a read receipt.  This can be good or bad depending on the perspective as it’s a bit more work for the servers to process. Ilse over at MS wrote up this little article that describes it pretty well.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/ilvancri/archive/2010/04/13/question-is-it-possible-to-check-if-a-message-has-been-read-even-when-the-sender-forgot-to-check-the-box-request-a-read-receipt-for-this-message.aspx

What isn’t included on that article is how to pull the information through PowerShell as an administrator.  The following commands will take care of that for you.

$temp = Search-MessageTrackingReport -Identity quest1@co.domain.com -Recipients "username@co.domain.com"

Get-MessageTrackingReport -Identity $temp.MessageTrackingReportID -RecipientPathFilter username@co.domain.com -ReportTemplate RecipientPath

Compliments of Mike Pfeiffer for the above PowerShell snippet and the full blog post can be found here.

http://www.mikepfeiffer.net/2012/01/generating-delivery-reports-and-tracking-messages-from-powershell/

As a side note, this works on 2010 & 2013 including Office 365.

As always YMMV.

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HTH