User Message Delivery Reports in Exchange 2010

In my last post, I discussed a current bug in the Exchange 2010 transport layer that disabled correct read receipt processing.  So I was wondering if there was any other way to handle this situation.  That pointed me to a new feature in Exchange 2010 that enables users to perform message tracking on their own to gather basic information.

End user message tracking is built into Exchange 2010 and the Outlook and OWA 2010 clients.  Actually, all message tracking is viewed through the Exchange Control Panel (ECP) which is a website hosted on the CAS server.  If a user opens OWA and selects Options, the ECP is opened.  On the Organize E-Mail node, the Delivery Reports tab can be selected.

To view Delivery Reports of a specific message from Outlook 2010, open the Sent Item, click on File from the menu and select Open Delivery Report:

To view Delivery Reports of a specific message from OWA 2010, navigate to Sent Items, right-click on message and select Open Delivery Report:

Once Open Delivery Report is selected the ECP will launch and take you directly to the Delivery Report for that message.  The user will have to log in just as if they were logging into OWA.

From this view the user can see if their message was successfully delivered or not.  Now this really doesn’t help out the read receipt issue as we have discussed before.  Note that delivery and read tracking status is not tied to email delivery and read receipts in any way.  This information is available whether or not the sender selects delivery/read receipt or not when creating the email. 

Read tracking status is disabled by default and can be enabled by running the following command:

Set-OrganizationConfig –ReadTrackingEnabled $true

This will enable read status tracking for everyone in the organization.  If this is unacceptable for a few users, those specific users can be disabled individually for read status tracking by running the following command:

Set-Mailbox “user” –MessageTrackingReadStatusEnabled $false

Now when we select Open Delivery Report, the following is shown.  Now we can tell that the message has been delivered, but has not been read:

Once the other user reads the email, the information in the Delivery Report is updated:

So what happens when the message is deleted?  The following status will be displayed:

These reports are quite useful and hopefully can help fill the gap in the read receipt processing issue that is currently in Exchange 2010.