Tip 148: Tracking E-mail?

"Is there any way in Outlook, besides the tracking feature, to see how many people opened an email?In Groupwise we had a feature in the Sent Items folder where we could click on properties and see:
How many people the email was sent to.
How many opened.
How many replied.
How many deleted.
Would love to know how to do this in Outlook (tracking does not seem to fit the bill on this, because people can turn the tracking defaults off)."

Sorry, no, this is one area where GroupWise outshines Outlook (and Exchange).

Outlook doesn't have any really good way of tracking anything more than the read state, assuming everyone the message was sent to allows read receipts to be returned. The use of web bugs was one way to track how many people viewed a message, but it's not effective with Outlook 2003's default option of blocked external content and it only told you how many people opened or loaded it into the preview pane.

Published June 22, 2004. Last updated on May 16, 2011.