It's true that I could make a version in which the recipient's controls are disabled - in fact, previous versions didn't have any recipient buttons at all. However, the "protection" provided by the mechanism used by this add-in is so weak that I felt that
that would lull users into a false sense of security...
For example, the flags that are modified on the send side are honoured only by the desktop version of Outlook at the receive side: if the recipient is using Outlook Web Access or a mobile device, the flag settings are ignored. It also only works when sender
and recipient are connected to the same Exchange server infrastructure.
Even if there were no recipient buttons, it's pretty trivial for the recipient to re-enable the disabled facilities via Outlook's build in macro editor.
Scott Hanselman's blog post that inspired this add-in shows how easy it is to disable reply-all via macros; it's not too difficult to work out how to reverse the operation. (The top of
this post gives you the answer!)
In addition, because I'm not preventing the recipient from copying the message body or saving attachments, it would be possible to simply create a brand new message and copy the contents of the reply/forward disabled one into it.
Finally, I've not actually seen any documentation that talks about the action flags I'm using, so there's no guarantee that the mechanism will continue to work in future versions of Exchange and Outlook - but that might just be a result of my poor search
skills.
In summary, it would be possible to create a variant of the add-in in which the recipient doesn't have direct control, but it's such a weak limitation that I don't think it's worthwhile - and could fool senders into thinking the system is more secure than
it really is and relying on it for something particularly sensitive.
If you do want a reliable and secure system for protecting emails,
Information Rights Management is the thing you should really be using.
Because I realise there are people who don't believe me and still want a version of the add-in with no recipient buttons or otherwise have different requirements, I've started a
series of blog posts on how to write such an add-in...
