Outlook – Managing Delivery and Read Receipts

Delivery and Read Receipts are the notices that Outlook sends you whenever an email you send has been delivered to, and read by, the recipient. This option to receive these receipts can be applied to individual emails, or globally, so that you receive a receipt for every email that you send. While you might think this would clutter your Inbox with receipts, the truth is that you can configure Outlook to efficiently manage the way receipts are handled.

From the Outlook menu, select Tools, Options, and on the Preferences tab, click Email Options.

Click Tracking Options.

Complete the dialog box as shown below and click OK until all dialog boxes are closed.

Note – In this case, I have selected to receive receipts both when the mail is delivered and when it is read. You can select both of these options, or you can select only one of them.

From now on, you will receive a read/delivery receipt (depending on what you selected) for every email that you send.

Some Notes:

In order for the receipts to be moved to your Deleted Items, and the so that the tracking information is saved, you must actually open each receipt. This action moves the receipt to your Deleted Items, and also creates a “Tracking” tab for each email that indicates when the message was delivered and/or read. To view tracking information for an email, double click the email in your Sent Items folder, then click the Tracking tab.

The delivery and/or read information is displayed. If you print the email from the Sent Items box, the Tracking information will also be printed.

NOTE: If instead of opening each receipt, you simply right click on it and select “Mark As Read”, the receipt will not be automatically deleted and the tracking information will not be saved in Sent Items.

If you don’t want to have to remember to periodically empty Deleted Items to permanently deleted the receipts, you can set Outlook up to permanently delete all items in your deleted items folder whenever you exit Outlook. (Tools, Options, Email Options, Advance Email Options, check next to “Empty the Deleted Items folder upon exiting”, Apply, OK).