Read receipts for your emails - source image: freeImages.com/ (c) Isaac Bowen 12 Aug 2006
Read receipts for your emails

I thought I would continue on the theme of Outlook again this week and cover Read Receipts. The little item that really helps when you need to know the person you have sent an important email to has actually received it.

We all think of email as a guaranteed service. It is not. Email can fail to be delivered for a number of reasons, among them is it ending up in the Spam folder. Even when it does arrive how do you know the person you sent it to has read it? Attaching a read receipt means that when an email is marked as read, you get a notification. This removes the frustration of chasing someone up only to discover that they didn’t get or read your email. You also have a record that is undisputable that it not only reached the recipient but that they read it too.

Start by creating an email as usual. Once you’ve finished including adding signatures and attachments you then add the Read Receipt.

email-message

How to activate a Read receipt

  • From the Options tab

options-tab

  • Locate and tick the Request a Read Receipt box.

You can also ask for the Request a Delivery Receipt.

When you send this email you will receive an email back stating if this message has been read by the recipient. You will also get another email stating that it has been delivered. One warning. If you were to send an email to several people at the same time and you add the read and delivery receipts you will be inundated with emails just for this one email! That is if the person you are sending this email to has a compatible system as not all email packages allow for this feature, more’s the pity.

Now I have shown you this ribbon you can investigate some of the other items listed which you may find very useful.

You do have the option to have this as a default for EVERY email that you send out. Beware! Doing this you will triple your incoming emails as every email sent will result in two extra emails back.so I suggest that you don’t set this a s a default but rather for the occasional ones that are important for you.

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