| Applies to |
Microsoft Office Outlook® 2003
Microsoft Outlook® 2002 |
If you are a network administrator or someone else who wants to track what computer was used to open an e-mail message that you sent, Outlook read receipts might provide you with your solution.
For this solution to work, you must first request a read receipt on the e-mail messages that you send by doing one of the following:
To be notified about all messages
- On the Tools menu, click Options.
- Click E-mail Options.
- Click Tracking Options.
- Select the Read receipt check box.
To be notified about a single message
- In the message, click Options.
- Under Voting and tracking options, select the Request a read receipt for this message check box.
Note Not all e-mail applications support the read receipt option. In addition, recipients have the option to block each or all read request confirmations from being sent. This feature cannot be used as an absolute indicator that a message was read by the recipient.
Read receipts arrive in your Inbox as messages. When you receive a read receipt, it indicates that someone opened the message. Additional information is available inside the Internet headers of the read receipt. Message headers provide a list of technical details about a message, such as who it came from, the software used to compose it, and the e-mail servers it passed through on the way to the recipient.
To view the Internet header, do the following:
- Open the read receipt message.
- On the View menu, click Options.
The headers appear in the Internet headers box.
Inside the headers you should find several lines that begin with Received: from. Starting from the top, the last of these lines indicates the computer that the e-mail message was sent from. In this case, the computer where the message you sent with a read receipt was opened and the read receipt e-mail message was created on.
An example of the entry might be similar to the following:
Received: from KellysPC ([192.168.0.27]) by smtpmail.litware.com with Microsoft SMTPSVC(6.0.3790.0);
Wed, 15 Dec 2004 13:38:49 -0800
This entry indicates that a computer with the name KellysPC with an assigned IP address of 192.168.0.27 was the computer on which the e-mail message was read, and that it was the computer on which the read receipt was created at 1:38 P.M. (local time of the computer), on Wednesday, December 15, 2004.
Note Because many computers are behind firewalls or on private IP networks, the address shown might not be a public IP address that you can look up using Internet search utilities. For example, IP addresses in the range of 192.168.0.0 to 192.168.255.255 are reserved for private networks. The same is true for IP addresses between 10.0.0.0 and 10.255.255.255, and 172.16.0.0 to 172.31.255.255. If you need the public IP address — most likely the organization's e-mail server or Internet service provider (ISP) (ISP: A business that provides access to the Internet for such things as electronic mail, chat rooms, or use of the World Wide Web. Some ISPs are multinational, offering access in many locations, while others are limited to a specific region.) e-mail server address, examine the Received: from lines higher up in the header.
