The following articles were included in our Exchange Messaging Outlook (EMO) newsletter published on April 6, 2017.
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Today's Highlights:
- New for Outlook 2016 for Mac: Read Receipts
- Flag for Follow up the Next Business Day
- Exchange 2007 End of Life
- Fixed: Search in Outlook 2016 POP Accounts
New for Outlook 2016 for Mac: Read Receipts
The latest builds of Office 2016 for Mac include a frequently requested feature: Read & Delivery Receipts. However, it is only supported in Office 365 accounts (business and enterprise only). Look for it in the Insider Fast build (15.34.17404) released this week and general availability within several weeks. The option to request read and/or delivery receipts is on the compose mail's Options ribbon and Draft menu.
If you are not familiar with receipts (because Outlook for Mac did not support it), receipts are notification that the message was received or read.
Delivery receipt: send a notification mail when the email has been delivered to the mailbox.
Read receipt: send a notification mail when email has been opened by the recipient
Not all email clients can return read receipts and recipients usually have the option to not return one. Neither receipt option will guarantee you that the message was placed in the Inbox or read. If the recipient reads it using a client that does not support receipts or has an option to not return receipts, you won't get one back. A 'deleted unread' receipt tells you that the recipient deleted a copy of the message without marking it Read, it does not guarantee they didn't read it without marking it read.
If the recipient's server supports delivery receipts, you'll be notified when the message is added to the recipient's mailbox, if not, Office 365 generates a message that the message was handed off to the server and Office 365 doesn't know what happened to it. If the recipient uses an email client that supports responding to read receipts, you should receive notification when the message is read or deleted unread, provided it's not filtered out by antispam software.
Flag for Follow up the Next Business Day
A user wanted to know how to change the tomorrow flag to "next business bay":
Every email which need follow-up is flagged in order of importance with today, tomorrow, this week or next week. Unfortunately, however, the tomorrow flag is not usable on Friday because the reminder is then set to Saturday although I have excluded both Saturday and Sunday in my work week set in the calendar options.
The 'this week' and 'next week' flags use the last day of your work week as the due date, but as you have discovered, the tomorrow flag really is Tomorrow, not the next business day.
We can use a VBA function to make the change using a macro. We can even look at holidays and out of office events on your calendar and move it to your next day at work.
How it works: the macro watches for you to flag a message then checks to see if the flag was for tomorrow. If so, it checks to see if tomorrow is a weekend, holiday, or out of office, and moves the due date to your next business day.
Get this macro and instructions at Flag for Follow up the Next Business Day
As written, the holiday checks for all day events marked as tentative, busy, working elsewhere, or out of office. You could rewrite it to check other fields.
I have a second macro that creates appointments every nn workdays. Like the flag macro, it checks for weekends, holidays and out of office events. The original macro did not count business days, it only moved the event to the next business day if the due date fell on a weekend or holiday. That macro is now counting business days and creates appointments for every nn working day, thanks to a Workday function written by Excel expert Chip Pearson.
Exchange 2007 End of Life
The End of Life for Exchange server 2007 is April 11, 2017. While this doesn't mean that it will die on that date, there will be no more security updates, support from Microsoft, bug fixes, or time zone updates. Organizations still using Exchange 2007 should be working on a migration plan to Office 365 or Exchange 2016.
For more information on your options, see Exchange 2007 End of Life Roadmap (Microsoft)
As a reminder, Office 2007 is also no longer supported and as of October 31, 2017, it will not sync with Office 365 Exchange accounts (including Outlook.com). Users will need to upgrade to Office 2016 to continue syncing mailboxes, or switch to IMAP for email.
Fixed: Search in Outlook 2016 POP Accounts
Two weeks ago I mentioned that search was not working for PST files in POP accounts. This is fixed in build 7870.2031. After updating, you may need to rebuild the search index.
Other Resources
Remove Email Signature from Message using VBA
Remove a signature from a message using a VBA macro.