Microsoft rolled out read receipts in Teams. It shows you if your messages were read or not. By default it’s enabled. You get a popup that read receipts is available and how it looks like. In this post I provide an overview.
Teams Client
In the Teams client settings you can disable or enable it depending on what’s configured in your Office 365 tenant.


Teams Admin Center
If required, a Teams administrator can configure read receipts by modifying Teams messaging policies in the Teams Admin Center as depicted below.

- By default, read receipts are on and the message policy configuration is set to“User Preference” which means that users can disable it within their Teams Client settings.
- Turned on for everyone: It’s enabled for all users and a user cannot turn it off.
- Turned off for everyone: It’s disabled for all users and a user cannot turn it on.
Limitations [January 2020]
The “Manage messaging policies in Teams” documentation says
- it is for 1:1 chat or chats with up to 20 people
- it is not caputered in eDiscovery reports
Conclusion, opinion and summary
It’s another neat feature to easily recognize if your chat message was read or not. Thus you can decide how to react, e.g. send a priority notification or make a call.

Additional resources
- Microsoft Team – Read Receipts in private chats [Microsoft 365 Roadmap ID 51552]
- Manage Microsoft Teams messaging policies