Outlook - Read recepit greyed out - GPO

Question

Hi everyone,
on our GPO we have enabled the tracking option for Outlook 2016 (and 365) so a read receipt is requested for all messages a user send.

Until two weeks ago, on Outlook the receipt option on the client was enabled (by the gpo rule) but wasn't greyed out, so the user was able to disable it for specific emails.

Now the option is greyed out, and the user can't modify it for specific emails, and that's not what we wanted.

Has something changed in Outlook so this rule now affects it in a different way?
Is there a way to achieve our goal, so to have the read recepit active by default but unselectable?
Thank you!

Answer 1

Hi @SCapo451 ,

Welcome!

According to my tests, using Outlook 365, once I enable the tracking option in GPO like your screenshot, after restarting the Outlook desktop client, the tracking options in Outlook would immediately turn grey like below:

And as I know, it is quite normal that those setting you configured will turn grey in Outlook. Outlook will follow the settings you configured in the GPO and those settings will be grayed out and cannot be changed. Many other Outlook settings(AutoArchive settings for example) in GPO will also greyed out, work the same. Not quite sure why this option would delay working in your organization but we indeed could not modify those settings in Outlook if you still keep your GPO settings.

As a workaround for emails that you do not would like Read Receipt, maybe you could edit and send them using web mail client, though indeed inconvenient.

---

If an Answer is helpful, please click "Accept Answer" and upvote it.
Note: Please follow the steps in our documentation to enable e-mail notifications if you want to receive the related email notification for this thread.