Message Read Status Reporting

Question

Hey Team,&nbsp;&nbsp;Does any one here know if there is a canned script that will report on whether or not a user has read a message?&nbsp;&nbsp;I realize message tracking can be used to report if a message was delivered, or mailbox auditing reports can be used to track what a user has done with a message (except for owner reads). I also understand there are on-prem cmdlets that can be used to report the same.&nbsp;&nbsp;I know you can use Search-Mailbox which is what i have used in the past but I was hoping for something that hasn't been deprecated.&nbsp;&nbsp;I found this:&nbsp;https://practical365.com/tracking-read-email-messages-exchange-server/&nbsp;doesnt work for exchange online.&nbsp;&nbsp;This:&nbsp;http://www.lab365.in/2017/02/monitoring-email-read-status-using-ews.html&nbsp;- does work but is well beyond my skillset as far as powershell / ews are concerned.&nbsp;&nbsp;However what we are in need of is a way to report whether or not a user or list of users (provided via input file) have read messages in their inbox.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Thanks,&nbsp;&nbsp;Robert&nbsp;

vasilmichev · Answer

All those methods give you the *current* status of the message, I can very well read it, mark it unread and pretend I never opened it. So if your goal is to check whether a given message has been read/interacted with, you can use url tracking and such, all those good old marketing (spammer) tricks 🙂
Another option would be to use the MailItemsAccessed event, but those require advanced auditing and are generally too noisy: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/compliance/advanced-audit?view=o365-worldwide#mailitemsaccessed

robert bollinger · Answer

Thanks for your help on this. It looks like that may work, previously I did look at the unified audit logs, but every time I checked for any mail events the results always came back blank. I now realize that we need E5s or An addon for Every user we want to monitor.

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Message Read Status Reporting

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