Disable Read-Receipt replies on Exchange 2003 SP2

Question

I got a new one today: a marketer sent one of my clients a spam with a read-receipt request attached to it, then replied to the read-receipt to demonstrate he knew my client had read his spam.

The client is using an Entourage client against a Exchange 2003 SP2 system. Entourage doesn't appear to deal with read-receipt requests itself, everything I've read suggests that it is a "feature" in the server itself.

Putting aside the evil diabolicalness of such a plan, I can't seem to figure out how to prevent Exchange from responding to read-receipt requests.

I have gone through the System Manger to Global Settings -> Internet Message Formats -> Default -> Advanced, and disabled the 'allow delivery reports' field.

My user has logged on to OWA, and confirmed that in Options -> Privacy and Junk E-mail Prevention, the Do Not Automatically Respond To Requests field is checked.

How do I turn off this functionality?

Answer 1

OK. Entourage doesn't support read receipts at all. So at some point MS decided that if you are using it with Exchange it will reply for you (automatically).

Check out this utility to deal with the 'feature' at your Exchange server.

Blurb from page:

Purpose: Read Receipt Remover for MS Exchange 2000/2003 application (RRR) can remove the read receipt request from each inbound e-mail message delivered to default Inbox folder of user's personal mailbox. So the Read Notification will never be sent back to the message originator. The application is an Exchange store synchronous event sink.

You're looking at about US$150 per Exchange server to buy this.

HTH

Answer 2

Or, you can enable "Do not send deliver reports" under the Exchange Advanced tab.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/271419

There's also a hotfix that you'll have to apply

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/324636

Answer 3

read-requests are typically handled by the client. The client gets the mail, and sends a reply. Thunderbird, for instance, can be configured in several ways: always, never, and ask. AFAIK, the server would never handle this bad idea, as it only knows if the mail was transmitted, not if it was actually displayed to a user.