Like me, your email recipient may have turned off the ability to respond to read requests, or they may just choose “no” on a one-off basis (if they don’t mind annoying pop-ups). Well, just because you’ve asked doesn’t mean you’ll receive. Apparently, they don’t realize that getting the acknowledgment they’re looking for requires actual cooperation on the part of the recipient. Why tell you this? Because it seems that a number of emailers still send read receipt requests (though, really, I wouldn’t know …). No annoying pop-up - no receipt - happy me. It wasn’t long before I found it and silenced them permanently - telling Outlook never to send a receipt, no matter how nicely the sender asked. (“No, you can’t know that I received and read your email - that’s my business, not yours.”) Eventually, I began poking around for a way to turn off those occasional, annoying pop-ups.

My reflexive privacy twitch always caused my finger to click “no” every time that box appeared. I may have been naive in those days, but I was also (and still am) private and paranoid. I’d sometimes be surprised by a little pop-up that accompanied an email I’d just opened in Microsoft Outlook, asking me to please confirm receiving and reading that email: aka a “read receipt.” Back in the day when I was a young and naive pup, I didn’t pay much attention to how my email was set up.

Windows 10 outlook read receipt