This week, Google announced the launch of a new optional feature: read receipts. Apparently the feature was heavily requested on Google’s Product Ideas, and this time Google answered.
Read receipts inform senders whether their messages have been read and allow recipients to acknowledge that they received something. The receipts are either automatically generated when a message is opened or manually approved, depending on the administration settings.
Carl Haverl, the software engineer at Google announcing the project, offerss the following example:
“Let’s say John works in sourcing for his company and wants to make sure that his suppliers receive his purchase orders. As he sends each one out, John can request a receipt and later check that the recipients have received the orders. Conversely, if someone sends John a message with a request for receipt, Gmail can send a receipt to the sender when John opens the message.”
Read receipts are appended to the message you send. Here’s what one looks like:
Google has decided to make the feature only available to Google Apps for Business and Google Apps for Government users. They claim that the tool is most valuable in these settings, especially in helping to improve communication with customers, partners and vendors.
Some Gmail users won’t be happy that. And what about the Education users? They won’t be happy either, as voiced in some of the comments on Gmail’s blog already.
But here at Baydin we do use Google Apps for Business, so we get to start using them. I’m excited to see how they will affect both our communication internally and our response rate externally. If we find them useful I’ll be sure to update the post and let you know how.
If you use Google Apps for Business or Government and you’re interested in putting the feature to use, log in to your administrative control panel and look for “Email read receipts” on the Settings page for email. If you need more information, just visit Google’s Help Center!
