Sending mail as read-only

Thanks for the great question. Natively, Microsoft Exchange server does not support creation of read-only e-mail messages, so if you're trying to achieve this with solely Microsoft Exchange Server and Microsoft Outlook, you're out of luck.

However, if this functionality is of high importance to your organization, you may want to have a look at other technologies from Microsoft. Microsoft has recently released Microsoft Windows Rights Management Services which permits integration with Microsoft Outlook on the client side and enables control of e-mail 'editability', 'forwardability' and 'printability', essentially making read-only e-mails possible (see Rights Management for E-mail Messages for more information). In order to achieve the kind of functionality you're looking for, you'd have to deploy Windows Rights Management Client, the Active Directory Extensions Client (required by Windows Rights Management Client) and the Rights Management add-on for Microsoft Outlook 2003 across your environment.

More information on Windows Rights Management Services can be found here.

Do you have comments on this Ask the Expert Q&A? Let us know.