Force recipients to Reply All in Outlook

Have you ever sent a mail and asked that recipients use Reply All, only to have some people respond just to you? Then YOU have to forward the mail to the rest of the group. Thankfully, there is a way to force Outlook to send replies to a specific list of recipients regardless of whether they click Reply or Reply All.

First, when composing your message, go to the Options tab in Outlook 2010 and click Direct Replies To:

This opens the Properties dialog box. Click the Have replies sent to box and then use Select Names to add the other people on the thread (your name should be preselected; make sure you keep it!):

Once you're done adding names, click OK and then Close. Now finish your message and send it.

This actually just overrides the recipient list for the Reply button (just you by default), so that either Reply All or Reply will send to the same list if you configure it that way. Alas, it does not restrict use of the Reply All button - so if you want people to reply just to you, you'll have to hope they read closely and choose the correct button.

Or you could use Information Rights Management or even a custom email message form, but those are topics for another day.

Suzanne

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  Not using this method. It's on the honor system; it's just meant to prevent recipients from accidentally forgetting to Reply All. (Happens to us all!) I'm working to explore some additional methods that might meet your enforcement needs in one or more future articles, though they're a little more involved than this method - which should work generally well for this scenario.

• Anonymous
  April 11, 2011
  Nice article. but when I click on reply outlook does populate all the reciepient, but I can always remove them. is there a way to override the removal of the configured reciepient?

• Anonymous
  April 11, 2011
  Request you to drop me a response on bhavik.shah@atidan.com

• Anonymous
  June 27, 2011
  Very nice feature. As I understand this needs to be set for each composed message. Is there any way this can be set for all outgoing mails to be sent to specific mail ID

• Anonymous
  October 17, 2011
  Very informative post. Thanks for taking the time to share your view with us. <a href="www.column5.com/">epm consulting</a>