Never send a response does not work -> Jeff Stephenson

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sam

Jeff Stephenson,



I have noticed a situation that affects security at our
department.



Users of Outlook 2002, with all of the updates applied
(Outlook 2002 (10.4712.4219) SP-2), are sending messages
that they have no knowledge of and there is no record of
their transmission.


If a message that has the "return receipt requested" flag
set is deleted without being read, a "Not Read:" message
is dispatched to the original sender even though the
setting <tools> <options> <E-mail options> <Tracking
Options> "Never send a response" is set.

This would pose a security issue for those who do not want
to acknowledge the existence of an email account under any
circumstance.

We also have a policy that requires the deletion without
reading of any email for which the receiver does not
recognize the sender. This is to avoid virus and Trojan
infection, as well as to not verify to spam senders the
existence of a valid email.

For those who use Outlook as their primary email client,
this heretofore unknown and unwanted silent response would
have been providing others confirmation that the email was
received by a valid email account.

This is a problem.

I have noticed some traffic in the news groups that leads
me to believe that you know of this situation and may have
some knowledge of how to avoid the problem and what
Microsoft may be doing to alleviate it.

Thank you for your help.
 
This is fixed in SP-3 of Outlook 2002 (due out early next year) and in
Outlook 2003. For now, you can work around it by having users go to their
deleted items folder and selecting all messages (Ctrl-A) and marking them as
read (Ctrl-Q) before emptying the inbox. A pain, I know, but it's the only
workaround without the fix. Note that marking the message as read will
*not* violate the company policy of not opening the messages - it only sets
the "message read" flag and triggers the read-receipt confirmation logic, it
will not actually open or display the message.
 
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