How to tell if someone read your email on gmail

Waiting for someone to reply to an important email can be a frustrating experience. The reasons for the lack of correspondence could be that they are busy, avoiding answering, haven’t yet read it or haven’t even received it.

This process is made simple in messaging apps like WhatsApp which display ticks to indicate delivery and when the message has been read, but is there a similar thing for email?

How to see if someone read your email outlook

Unfortunately not, but there are a few ways you tell if someone has seen your message or not.

Using Read Receipts

The traditional way to know if someone has opened any emails was to use the Read Receipts feature.

But this isn’t universally available in all email apps.

If yours has it, and it tends to be available only for business users, not consumers, then you can enable it and it may work. However, recipients might see a pop-up asking them to agree to the Read Receipt being sent back to you.

They can deny this request, which kind of defeats the point.

Gmail – the free consumer version – doesn’t have a read receipt option, so you’d have

how to check if an email is read

how to see when an email is read in outlook