Question

I am programmatically “reading” emails using WebDav. I am also deleting these emails when I’ve finished having my way with them, however, this is causing an interesting problem. Each time I delete an email the original sender is getting a not read response. I have logged into Outlook Web App and checked the option Do not automatically send a response but this doesn’t seem to help.

Is there ANY way to remove the request for read receipt from the email before deleting it?

Answer 1

We decided that we didn’t want to make any modifications to our server and a solution that could be implemented in my existing program would be the most ideal.

I read on a few sites if the email was marked as read through IMAP commands on the exchange server that the read receipt would not be sent when deleted/opened via the client (Outlook Web App or Outlook). So that is what we did:

Logged into email server via IMAP

. LOGIN [e-mail] password

Selected the folder to process

. SELECT Inbox

Made the changes to all emails in the folder

. STORE 1:* flags \SEEN

This sequence marks all the emails in the inbox as read, which then allows my program to delete the emails after processing without a receipt being generated.