Read Receipts in Outlook: How to Turn Them On – and Why They Prove Nothing

A read receipt is the first thing almost everyone reaches for when they want to show that an email arrived. It is quick to switch on, and most of the time it does exactly what it should. Just not when it matters.

This article covers both: how to request one in every version of Outlook, and what it is worth when things get serious.

Requesting a read receipt in classic Outlook

For a single message: while composing, open the Options tab and tick Request a Read Receipt in the Tracking group. Right next to it is Request a Delivery Receipt – the two are not the same, more on that below.

For all messages: go to File › Options › Mail, scroll down to the Tracking section and tick the read receipt option. It then applies to every email you send.

How Outlook responds to incoming requests is set in the same section: always send, never send, or ask each time.

Read receipts in new Outlook and Outlook on the web

While composing a message, open the Options tab on the ribbon and select Request a Read Receipt under Tracking. If the group is not shown, you will find it under More options.

There is currently no setting for all messages here (as of September 2026): in new Outlook and on the web you request the receipt message by message. How to respond to incoming requests is set under Settings › Mail › Message handling, in the Read receipts section.

Delivery is not reading

Two terms that are constantly confused:

• The delivery receipt comes from the recipient's mail server. It says: the message was accepted.
• The read receipt comes from the recipient's mail client. It says: someone opened the message.

The first is technically reliable but says nothing about reading. The second says something about reading, but it is voluntary.

Why a read receipt carries no weight in a dispute

Three reasons, and any one of them is enough.

The recipient decides. Microsoft says so itself: the recipient can decline to send a read receipt, and there is no way to force them. Whoever does not want to confirm does not confirm – and you will not even learn that they declined.

Many clients never send one. The request is just a header field that a mail client is free to ignore. Microsoft itself mentions the case where the recipient's program does not support read receipts at all.

And even when it arrives, it does not prove what you need. Legally, what matters for receipt is not whether someone read the message but whether it reached their sphere of control. A missing read receipt says nothing about that – and that is exactly the case that ends up in court.

What counts instead

The following describes German law; other jurisdictions have their own rules.

The German Federal Court of Justice ruled in 2022 that, in business-to-business dealings, an email is deemed received once it is available for retrieval on the recipient's mail server during normal business hours. Whether it was actually retrieved or read is irrelevant (BGH, judgment of 6 October 2022, VII ZR 895/21).

That shifts the key question: you do not need to prove reading, but the handover to the recipient's mail server. And for that you need nobody's cooperation.

Worth knowing: sending alone is not enough. Under German case law, a plain email without confirmation creates no prima facie evidence that it arrived – not even when no error message came back (see, for example, Higher Regional Court Rostock, order of 3 April 2024). The burden of proof lies entirely with the sender.

A server-side proof of delivery closes the gap

What you need is not created in the recipient's mail client but on the way there:

• the receiving server's acknowledgement with response code, time and the queue identifier that server assigned itself
• the type of connection used for the handover, and whether encryption was mandatory
• a hash of the bytes handed over, proving that exactly this content went out
• a log that cannot be smoothed over afterwards: every entry chained to the previous one, the head of the chain sealed at regular intervals

Conbool SecureMail keeps exactly this chain and produces an evidence document as a PDF from it at the click of a button – on demand or automatically by email to the sender. If the message runs through the message portal, every opening and every attachment download is also recorded with time and IP address. That is the read confirmation nobody can decline, because it is not reported by the recipient's program but logged by the portal.

What this proof is not: a qualified timestamp from a trust service provider under eIDAS. The times come from the operation of the service. How a court weighs it depends on the facts of the case.

In short

A read receipt is a courtesy signal, not evidence. Switch it on if it helps you day to day. For anything that may need proving, you need a log that does not depend on the recipient playing along.

This article provides a general overview and is not legal advice. For your specific case, please consult a lawyer.