Preventing Read and Delivery Receipts in an Exchange Online environment

I have an environment comprising mailboxes on an MS Exchange Online Plan 2 server and Office 365 / Office 2016 versions of Outlook.

I want to disable all external requests for read and delivery receipts (e.g. requests made by external domains). In fact I have no interest in supporting these for the internal domain either.

What is happening currently is that some external organisations are requesting read or delivery receipts and they are immediately getting the message ""Message was deleted without being read"

This may be because of a document management system that is taking a BCC copy of all incoming and outgoing emails for further processing e.g. the delete without being read might be coming from one of the document management system mailboxes rather than the recipients mailbox.

I am just interested in switching off all read / delivery receipts. Having done some searching I see earlier versions of Exchange allowed a transport rule to be configured that targeted read receipts directly or alternatively allowed message headers to be modified to prevent read / delivery receipts (called Disposition-Notification) - however I can't find these options in the latest version of Exchange Online I am using. See the attachment Capture-2 showing what was available before.

I do however have options that relate to "remote domains" that were not present on earlier Exchange versions. The option disabling "Allow non-delivery reports" appears to be the most promising. See attachment Capture.jpg

It may be the options I am looking for are available but in menus I have not yet found....

PS - I want all the processing to be handled at the Exchange Online Server level and not be rules in Office 365 / Office 2016.

Can anyone suggest what transport rules / settings are needed ?
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tigger44Asked:
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timgreen7077Exchange EngineerCommented:
the below link will show you how to disable read receipts via transport rules.  don't disable any of the options in your attached screenshots. those are not read reciept.

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/change-what-happens-when-you-receive-a-read-receipt-request-65a726c7-d4e5-4bed-bc6e-a630b52f965f
tigger44Author Commented:
Hi Tim, the behaviours that I am seeing (and wish to stop) is happening purely at the Exchange Online level.

The external recipient is getting the "Message was deleted without being read" response without any interaction from the Outlook client. This is likely to be caused by the way the document management system is copying every email to a journalling mailbox, then applying categories filing elsewhere followed by finally deleting the journalling copy.

That is why I need to make the change at the Exchange level.  

Whether the "Message was deleted without being read" is being triggered by a read receipt or delivery receipt request I am not yet sure.

Cheers, Dave
tigger44Author Commented:
I have done some more searching and found the instructions of an "on premise" version of Exchange 2013 - this is exactly what I want to do.  see Capture-4.jpg

These are the menu options I have with Exchange Online - but there are no menu options for identifying read receipts. see Capture-3.jpg
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timgreen7077Exchange EngineerCommented:
See the attachment. This is a read receipt rule i created in O365 Exchange online. This should work in order to delete those read reciepts.
This is an actual test rule I created just now.
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timgreen7077Exchange EngineerCommented:
you need to select the message properties > include the message type, and this will give you the option to select read receipts.
tigger44Author Commented:
Yes this is looks like a solution - I am planning to test this on Monday and will confirm then.

Thanks for your help.
timgreen7077Exchange EngineerCommented:
sure and good luck.
tigger44Author Commented:
The screenshot that timgreen7077 was exactly what was needed to provide the required behaviour .

Interestingly I found it difficult to located the "Messgae type is..." option on my user interface. After playing about for a little while I found this option - most odd.

Thanks again !
timgreen7077Exchange EngineerCommented:
Answer provided. closing question unless author reopens.
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