
close
close
Chance to win $250 in Petri 2023 Audience Survey
A developer at Microsoft Research named Gavin Smyth in Cambridge, UK, has created a neat, but little-known Outlook add-in utility called NoReplyAll that prevents people from replying to all the recipients of a message or forwarding it. The add-in uses a facility built into Outlook and Exchange that’s more lightweight than Information Rights Management (IRM) and doesn’t require any type of back-end configuration from the IT department.
After installation, it adds a few buttons to the Outlook ribbon that allows a user to control the recipient’s ability to reply to all recipients in your email message, forward it, and so on. The add-in also includes a check for common email errors, such as omitting attachments or subject lines.
Note: Although this feature is handy for people working mostly with email that is internal to the same organization, it does not work for external recipients that are using other email clients. In addition, the recipient may enable or change these settings if they want to, even without the permission of the sender. This means that this type of mechanism is very weak and only partially useful and shouldn’t be used if there is true need to restrict distribution of email messages (for legal reasons, for example).
If you want a mechanism for protecting your emails in a much more secure and robust manner, then use the IRM facilities that Exchange Server offers. As stated above, IRM is a much more robust technology that is integrated with Exchange Server 2010/2013 and Active Directory. It also requires a much more complex setup and configuration. On the other hand, using IRM allows you to prevent an authorized recipient from forwarding, modifying, printing, faxing, saving, cutting, pasting or even taking screen captures of content. In addition, it protects supported attachment file formats and allows you to configure expiration of email messages and attachments so that they can no longer be viewed after the specified period. Microsoft Office applications, such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook can be used to create and consume protected content.
Going back to our article’s focus, the email recipient doesn’t need to have this add-in installed to have reply all disabled. As long as the sender and recipient both have mailboxes in the same Exchange organization, and as longs as the recipient is using the Outlook email client, these settings settings get passed along.
After installing NoReplyAll, you’ll notice extra buttons at the end of the ribbon bar on a new email message window. You may need to increase the window size if you don’t see these buttons.
The NoReplyAll add-in is now featured in Outlook’s ribbon. (Image Credit: Daniel Petri)
NoReplyAll Settings. (Image Credit: Daniel Petri)
NoReplyAll sends a message notifying the user that the action isn’t available for the email item. (Image Credit: Daniel Petri)
More in Office
M365 Changelog: Manage result layouts for SharePoint results in Microsoft Search
Dec 20, 2022 | Rabia Noureen
M365 Changelog: (Updated) Stream on SharePoint: Inline playback of videos in Hero web part
Nov 23, 2022 | Rabia Noureen
M365 Changelog: (Updated) Office for the web rebrand on Service health and Message center
Nov 16, 2022 | Rabia Noureen
Most popular on petri