How To Activate and Deactivate Read Receipts in iMessage

Having an iPod Touch, iPhone or iPad capable of running iOS 5 or iOS 6 means that you will be able to send free text messages, photos or videos through iMessage. This works as long as the other party also has iMessage running on their phone or Mac running OS X Mountain Lion. Read receipts are part of the service and they permit the other party to know whether or not you have viewed a message they sent. While this can be useful in business situations when your partner can rest assured that you have received his stock quotes, most people don’t want to be dependent on this service. Here’s how you can turn off or turn on this feature in iOS.

First you need to launch Settings from your iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch. Tap Messages and slide the Send Read Receipts to the On position if you would like people to be notified of when you have read their messages. If on the other hand you want to remain secretive, slide this to the Off position. If you choose to set Send Read Receipts to On your contacts will be able to see the status that comes with every message, notifying them of the exact time and date you read their message.

 

If you are using Mountain Lion as your flavor of OS X an wish to turn Read Receipts Off or On, here’s how to do it: first launch Messages and choose Preferences from the Messages menu on the top of the screen (left side, right next to the Apple logo). In the new window that appears go to Accounts and select your iMessage account. There will be a Send read receipts text there and you can check or uncheck it to enable or disable Read Receipts.