Outlook - how to log/keep record of read-receipts

Question

In my job, I receive e-mails from the authorities (in Outlook 2013) that I have to forward to the relevant parties in my company. It is important that they are read, and it is a requirement that we keep a record of each mail (circular) that we receive and forward, and that everyone has read it.

Currently, I ask for a read-receipt and log it into Excel. However, it is cumbersome and prone to oversight and error to have to go into Excel and log each e-mail and who has read it manually. In case of an audit, I need to be able to show that we have sent out the mails and that they have been read. Therefore, I turn to you in hope that you can offer me some advice on how to automatize the process somewhat.

For example, is there any way I can get (preferably) Excel or some other program to log an entry when I receive an e-mail in my read-receipts folder in Outlook? Any suggestions would be highly appreciated! Sorry for the long question!

Answer 1

This is certainly possible - but not easy!

First thing to note is that many enterprises turn off the ability to run VBA macro's in Outlook so you need to deal with that.

After that, it is possible to set up an action on incoming email that triggers a macro when the email "form" is a read receipt.

The macro needs to make a connection to somewhere appropriate to store the information. Maybe a spreadsheet though that is prone to locking issues. Better would be a database of some kind.

Having made a suitable connection, it is a matter of getting the data from the read receipt form object and adding a new record to your persistent store.

As you can see, this is something that goes rather a long way beyond a simple answer here in superuser so I'm not even attempting to provide some code I'm afraid.

Unless you are proficient with VBA and Office programming, you are likely to struggle. However, this does work, some while back I wrote a utility this way to record all my incoming and outgoing emails to a noSQL database (CouchDB) so that I could perform analytics on them.

---

An alternative approach, if you have access to a Linux based mail server, would be to forward all the read receipts to that server and use local scripting to update a database.