Outlook read receipts: How do you set one up?

If a sent e-mail remains unanswered, one inevitably asks oneself whether the electronic message has actually arrived at the addressee and has been read. It remains uncertain whether, for example, the cancellation of the newspaper subscription or the cancellation of the hotel booking was actually successful. And perhaps the offer made to a customer was not bad at all, but was simply never considered because it ended up in the spam folder.

To avoid such problems, you can set up a read receipt in e-mail clients like Outlook. This will prompt the recipient to acknowledge receipt of the message. If the recipient does this, you will receive a corresponding response, which will put an end to speculation about the status of the corresponding e-mail.

This article explains how to use the read receipt in your Outlook client or in Outlook Web.

If you want to use read receipts in Microsoft Outlook to know when your messages have been read, you have two setting options. You can either make the read receipt the default, which automatically requests it for all e-mails sent, or you can send only selected messages with a read receipt.

The latter is particularly useful if you regularly send e-mails to certain people (friends, colleagues, business partners, etc.). In this case, asking repeatedly whether people have received an e-mail, if they have not yet responded, can be irritating for you and the other person. In the following instructions for the desktop versions Outlook 2016 and 2013 as well as the web app Outlook Web, you will therefore learn both how to set up read receipts for your entire message traffic and how to use receipts only in selected e-mails.