Microsoft Teams read receipts, know when a private chat message was read by the recipients

This is an interesting addition to Microsoft Teams, coming in June and targeted to be rolled out by July. Read receipts will now be a part of 1:1 and group chats. Read receipts in private chats allow senders to know when a message was read by the recipients.

Read receipts will be rolled out on by default with admin and user level controls to manage. If you would like your users to choose if they want read receipts on or off then there is no action required.

If you do not want your user to have read receipts, please change the admin portal value for read receipts to “off”. If you want to require everyone to have read receipts change the value to “everyone”.

This has 3 administrative settings available, now, in the Teams admin center under “messaging”:

• User Preference (DEFAULT): members of the tenant get to decide if they want read receipts ON or OFF. Default within the app is ON. Users can then turn it OFF.
• Everyone: everyone in the tenant will have the feature ON with no option to turn it off.
• Off: no one in the tenant has read receipts nor can they turn it on.

Microsoft advises, when read receipts are used in a large group chat (with over 100 users, for example), the receipt messages can overwhelm the actual messages, and lead to chat user frustration. This is something you will need to make users aware of. A smaller group chat (perhaps 20 users or less) makes better use of this feature.

Reference: MC180651