Microsoft Outlook™ Made Easier and Possible Return Receipt

12 | The Federal Lawyer | January 2010

ou probably work with Microsoft Outlook. De-

spite its obvious popularity, several of its most

useful functions are underused because find-

ing them requires a bit of work. The first half of this

month’s column includes a few easy-to-implement

suggestions that may save time, prevent extra stress,

and keep the plates spinning properly. The second

half of this column covers several programs that can

help you to know when your e-mails have been re-

ceived and opened. They amount to something simi-

lar to snail mail’s “Return Receipt Requested.”

Microsoft Outlook Made Easier

Color Coding Important Senders

One of those underused features of Mi-

crosoft Outlook is color coding. Let’s say that

you want e-mails from your spouse to be par-

ticularly obvious when they are in your Out-

look inbox. Or perhaps you want to respond

with lightning-like speed to e-mails from your

supervisor. Just go to Outlook’s Tools menu,

select “Organize,” then select “Using Colors,”

and then choose specific colors for e-mails

from specific sources. Choose red perhaps for your

spouse and maybe green for your boss.

Searching Made Easier

You can, of course, use your Outlook account as

a filing cabinet that has no organization whatsoever

and just search for particular past e-mails

by using Outlook’s native search feature.

However, instead of merely entering a

word into Outlook’s search box, you can

focus your search and avoid spurious hits

by giving the search engine specific param-

eters. If I recall that the client’s e-mail had the

word “deed” in the subject line, I can enter “sub-

ject: deed” to retrieve all e-mails about deeds.

Or if I want to find all e-mails from my wife, I

can enter “from: Cecilia.” This search-narrowing

technique works with several other limiting terms,

including “to,” “sent,” “cc,” and “message size.”

Making Better Use of Calendars

Attorneys sometimes build their work lives around

short bursts of time and sometimes around longer

blocks, depending on the nature of their practices,

but Outlook’s calendar function defaults to half-hour

scheduling parameters. A lawyer who prefers to look

at the day in hourly intervals, rather than accepting

Outlook’s default 30-minute blocks, can right click

anywhere hours are shown and select “60 minutes.”

(Other increments—such as 5, 10, and 15 minutes—

are also available.)

Some attorneys, including many government law-

yers, have their offices in one time zone and confer-

ence call responsibilities in other time zones. Outlook

can be set up to display other time zones right beside

the lawyer’s own time zone simply by right clicking

on the listed meeting hours, selecting “Change Time

Zone,” then checking the box labeled “Show an Ad-

ditional Time Zone.” This feature is helpful for those

who routinely work across time zones, because it pre-

vents mistakes caused by not anticipating the right

time for the other person. (This can help avoid wasted

calls during lunch hours, for example.)

A “Swap Time Zone” button can be used to quickly

change from one primary zone to another, a feature

that can help traveling lawyers translate their schedule

as they fly from place to place. An Outlook calendar

on laptop computers that includes calls to other zones

can adjust to the zone in which the user is working.

There you have it—a few suggestions that are

quite easy to implement and may save time, avoid

stress, and help you juggle many things at one time.

Now, let’s turn to ways to verify receipt of important

e-mails.

Return Receipt Solutions

It can be vexing to send an e-mail to opposing

counsel and wait for a response, only to have them

later deny receiving the e-mail you sent. Worse, per-

haps, is the lawyer who admits to having received the

e-mail but says he didn’t get around to opening it yet

because of the press of other business. There are ways

to protect yourself from such moments.

Configuring “Read Receipt” in Outlook Itself

Most of us must have configured our own Outlook

account just to send and receive e-mails. As noted

above, some of the e-mails we send might be impor-

tant and urgent, and you may need to know if the re-

cipient has read them and when. “Read Receipt” is an

internal Outlook feature that can be configured rather

easily. It can be set to provide a receipt for a single

message or to provide one for all Outlook messag-

es that you have sent (that is, if it works, of course).

If you want to configure “Read Receipt” for all

Microsoft Outlook™ Made Easier and Possible

Return Receipt Solutions

The Federal Lawyer In Cyberia

MICHAEL J. TONSING

January 2010 | The Federal Lawyer | 13

your e-mail within Outlook, go to the “Tools” pull

down, select “Options,” then select the “Preferences”

tab and locate a button called “E-mail Options.” In

the “E-mail Options” window, select “Tracking Op-

tions.” Enabling the “Read Receipt” option will make

sure that all the messages sent from your inbox will

have the receipt attached to it. You can also select

the “Delivery Report” checkbox to ensure that the

e-mail has been delivered. It is also possible to con-

figure “Read Receipt” for a single e-mail. After com-

posing your e-mail, click on the “Options” button and

follow the directions above, except check the boxes

for a single message.

For more “official” information on using this Out-

look feature, visit support.microsoft.com/kb/192929.

But also look at Microsoft’s guidance at support.

microsoft.com/kb/196495, where Microsoft candidly

admits that “Read Receipt” doesn’t always work: “Re-

gardless of the options you select, some e-mail servers

will never return a receipt and others may always re-

turn a receipt, regardless of whether or not the message

has been read. … Some e-mail servers that normally

return a delivery receipt will not send a receipt if the

message is sent in Microsoft Outlook rich-text format.”

Yikes! For a blog that discusses “Read Receipt” and

gives graphic images of what to click to set it up and

why, visit on-his-mind.blogspot.com/2009/07/how-to-

setup-read-receipt-in-outlook.html, the URL for Edwin

Watson’s blog called “On His Mind.”

However, if you find the above description daunt-

ing, scary, unsatisfactory, or just plain cumbersome—

or, if you, like me, absolutely would not want to get

an e-mail confirming the receipt of each sent e-mail

and don’t want to go through a series of steps for each

special e-mail—there are other choices. Read on.

Alternatives to Outlook’s “Read Receipt”

There are many certified e-mail services available.

(That is not surprising, given the serious limitations of

Outlook’s internal system.) However, these services

vary considerably in terms of the features they provide.

Some service require downloading software; others re-

quire that subscribers append their names to the recipi-

ents’ e-mail addresses (although recipients do not see

the names in the e-mail that has been delivered).

Point of Mail is one such service, which, according

to Pointofmail.com, is “the most powerful, useful and

reliable e-mail tracking service that exists on the Web

today.” At a yearly cost of $29.99 for basic service

(and up to $44.99 for super-duper service), Point of

Mail subscribers can both track and control e-mails

they’ve sent and know when e-mails and attachments

they’ve sent are read as well as where and for how

long they were read. If the e-mail has been forwarded,

you’ll know that too. Subscribers merely add “pointof-

mail” to the recipients’ e-mail address.

Delivery confirmation (under the super-duper plan)

can be sent as a text message to your cellular phone,

if you choose this option. The system even allows you

to “claw back” sent messages and to send messages

that “self-destruct” after a period of time. The bells

and whistles available far exceed the scope of this

column. A one-week free trial is available (up to 30

e-mails) by visiting www.pointofmail.com.

Point of Mail has modes that are not transparent to

the recipient, arguably infringing on their privacy but

perhaps accomplishing your mission as a lawyer. Us-

ers have reported that it can be difficult to forward or

reply to e-mail sent through Point of Mail.

ReadNotify is another sophisticated certified e-mail

service. Like Point of Mail’s Web site, readnotify.com

asserts that it “is the most powerful and reliable e-mail

tracking service that exists today. In short—ReadNotify

tells you when e-mail you sent gets read/re-opened/

forwarded and so much more.”

ReadNotify has options to let the sender know

whether an e-mail was opened under all circumstanc-

es and provides proof of sending as well, while keep-

ing virtually all the complexity behind easily acces-

sible plug-ins, tools, and e-mail shortcuts. The service

is recommended by about.com’s reviewers, who were

not as thrilled by Point of Mail’s product.

“If you need

to go the absolutely surest route, “ensured-receipt,”

ReadNotify messages will let you know about the

message status no matter what the recipient uses or

does,” says one comparative review found on about.

com. Unlike Point of Mail, ReadNotify lets the recipient

know that a receipt is being sent back to the sender.

Finally, two e-mail tracking services—Msgtag

(www.msgtag.com), which costs $20 a year and in-

cludes a free trial and offers a simpler free version,

and DidTheyReadIt (www.didtheyReadIt.com), which

costs $50 per year and has a free trial—actually in-

sert a small piece of HTML code into outgoing e-mail

messages, enabling the services to track your e-mails

for you but only when they have been received by

an HTML-compatible e-mail system like Outlook or

Outlook Express or by an Internet-based mail service

like Hotmail. Both of these services can tell senders

when the message was received and when it was

opened. DidTheyReadIt goes much further, allowing

the sender to find out how long the message window

was left open and whether the recipient forwarded

the message.

DidTheyReadIt also grabs the Internet provider’s

address (that is, the unique identifying computer ad-

dress) of the computer used to open an e-mail mes-

sage and then uses that address to determine the re-

cipient’s location—right down to the city he or she is

in. DidTheyReadIt even provides a link to MapQuest,

showing precisely where the recipient is. (As a recent

article in PC World magazine notes, in the hands of a

predatory adult who is in e-mail communication with

a child, this could be extremely dangerous!)

As a potential recipient of an e-mail missive from

either of these services, you can defeat them by

cyberia continued on page 15

January 2010 | The Federal Lawyer | 15

owner can take a reasonable amount of time to de-

termine if the morals clause has been implemented.

Although it seems unlikely that time will change the

result in Miss Celeb’s case, the brand owner does have

time to determine the public’s perception of the inci-

dent and decide if it wants to terminate the endorse-

ment arrangement.

Celebrity endorsements are a risky business for

brand owners. There are still hundreds of thousands

of boxes of Super Sugar Puffs boxes bearing Cindy

Celeb’s picture on the market, so there is some poten-

tial for damage to Super Sugar Puffs associated with

the agreement with Cindy Celeb. However, you can

minimize the damage by canceling the grocery store

appearances under the morals clause and not printing

any more cereal boxes that have her picture on the

front. While you are glad your attorney included the

morals clause in the agreement as a way to minimize

your damage, you are starting to understand how

Snap, Crackle, and Pop have been able to keep their

endorsement gig since the 1930s. TFL

Sarah Osborn Hill is a registered patent attorney and a

member of the Intellectual Property and Technology Li-

censing Group of Wyatt, Tarrant, & Combs LLP, where

she counsels clients and litigates in patent, trademark,

tising matters. She is based in the firm’s Louisville of-

fice and can be reached at [email protected].

Endnotes

See Noah B. Kressler, Using the Morals Clause in Tal-

ent Agreements: A Historical, Legal and Practical Guide,

o l u m b i a J. o f l. & t h e ar t s , 235, 240–41 (Winter 2005).

Adapted from Loew’s Inc v. Cole, 185 F.2d 641, 645

(9th Cir. 1950).

See Loew’s, 185 F.2d at 641, Twentieth Century Fox

Film Corp. v. Lardner, 216 F.2d 844 (9th Cir. 1954);

RKO Pictures Inc. v. Jarrico, 274 P.2d 928 (Cal. App.

1954); Scott v. RKO Radio Pictures Inc., 240 F.2d 87

(1957); Nader v. ABC Television Inc., 150 Fed. Appx.

54, 2005 WL 2404546 (Sept. 30, 2005).

See Kressler, supra note 1, at 235, 255.

Id. at 251–52.

Loew’s, 185 F.2d at 655–56.

Message continued from page 3

disabling your display of HTML content. Unfortunate-

ly, you won’t be able to see any other images that are

embedded in the body of received e-mail messages.

(Image files sent as e-mail attachments will still get

through, however.)

PC World points out that, for people who use Out-

look (versions 2000 through 2003) and don’t want to

turn off HTML in their mail messages, former Netscape

programmer Mike Belshe has created a free program

called “NoSpyMail” (belshe.com/nospymail) that can de-

tect and block Web bug elements in messages coming

through sources like Msgtag and DidTheyReadIt without

requiring you to turn off HTML in your e-mail software.

Conclusion

It is an interesting world out there in Cyberia. It is

important to know what’s going on and to take nec-

essary steps to protect your interests. In using any

software that tracks e-mail messages, it is crucially im-

portant for lawyers to consider all ethical implications,

including—but not limited to—the implications of us-

ing any source that could arguably compromise the

attorney-client privilege. TFL

Michael J. Tonsing practices law in San Francisco. He is a

member of the FBA editorial board and has served on the

Executive Committee of Law Practice Management and

Technology Section of the State Bar of California. He also

mentors less-experienced litigators by serving as a “second

chair” to their trials (www.Your-Second-Chair.com). He

can be reached at [email protected].

joining their bar.” As with the Rashomon Effect, it’s all

in the perspective.

So, by any means necessary, do something for the

greater good with some of your retirement time. As

Dylan Thomas wrote,

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Of course, you could also run for president of your

bar association. But above all else, do not go gentle

into that good retirement.

TFL

Endnotes

The National Native American Bar Association does

not have a section or a division devoted to senior law-

yers.

Adapted from “Twelfth Night,” Act 2, Scene 5: “Be

not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some

achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust

upon them.”

With apologies to Mr. Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

This is a specific example that Jim Richardson, a

former president of the FBA, and I got from the dean

of a law school in Washington, D.C., who thought that

students would find it beneficial to hear what someone

from the ethics review board of a state bar has to say.

Dylan Thomas, “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good

Night.” (1951)

With apologies to Dylan Thomas.

Cyberia continued from page 13