When you send an email, you can usually be confident that your message will be delivered quickly and without any issues – but how do you know whether the recipient has actually opened your message?
Thereโs plenty of reasons why your unopened email might hang around in the recipient’s inbox for a while – maybe theyโre out of office; perhaps theyโre travelling and donโt have access to the Internet, or maybe theyโve left the company and no-one is monitoring their inbox.
If youโre sick of wondering whether your email has even been opened, then you can use Appleโs Mail application to request read receipts. Receipts are notifications that are sent when an email is opened, so it doesnโt guarantee that your message has been read, understood, or whether the recipient is ever going to reply – but at least youโll know that your email has been received safely, and that someone is monitoring this particular inbox!
Appleโs Mail application doesnโt support read receipts out-of-the-box, but in this article Iโll be sharing a few Terminal commands that you can use to add this important piece of functionality to your Mail application.
Enabling Read Receipts with the Terminal
The Mail application doesnโt support read receipts by default, but you can enable this feature using your Macโs Terminal:
- Open a new โFinderโ window.
- Navigate to โApplications > Utilities.โ
- Launch the Terminal app.
- Copy/paste the following into the Terminal:
defaults read com.apple.mail UserHeaders
- Press the โEnterโ key on your keyboard.
Error: The domain/default pair doesnโt exist
When you enter the โdefaults read com.apple.mail UserHeadersโ command, you may occasionally encounter the following error:
“The domain/default pair of (com.apple.mail, UserHeaders) does not exist.โ
If you encounter this error, then copy/paste the following command into the Terminal, making sure to replace โNameโ and โemail@addressโ with your own information:
defaults write com.apple.mail UserHeaders ‘{“Disposition-Notification-To” = “Name <email@address>”; }’
Press the โEnterโ key on your keyboard, and then try running the following command again:
defaults read com.apple.mail UserHeaders
Your Mac should now accept this command without any complaints.
Stop receiving read receipts
If you want to disable read receipts at any point, then:
- Launch the Terminal (โApplications > Utilities > Terminal.โ)
- Copy/paste the following command into the Terminal:
defaults delete com.apple.mail UserHeaders
- Press the โEnterโ key on your keyboard.
Use the iRecepitMail third party app
If youโre not comfortable with Terminal commands, then you can request read receipts using a third party app. iReceiptMail is a popular solution thatโs priced at ยฃ10.00 for a single user, although a free 7 day trial is available, so you can try before you buy.
- Head over to the iRecepitMail website.
- Select โDownloadโ to try a 7 day free trial.
- Once the .dmg file has downloaded, launch it and follow the onscreen instructions to install.
- In order to send read receipts, iReceiptMail requires access to your Macโs accessibility features, so when prompted click โOpen the Security & Privacy preference paneโฆโ This should take you to the appropriate section of your Macโs System Preferences app.
- Click the little padlock in the bottom-left corner, and enter your admin password.
- Make sure โAccessibilityโ is selected in the left-hand menu.
- In the right-hand menu, find โiRecepitMailโ and โiRecepitMailToolsโ and then select their accompanying checkboxes.
Relaunch iReceiptMail and you should notice that a new icon has been added to your menu bar. Click the new โiRecepitMailโ icon and make sure โEnabledโ is selected.
Assuming that you want to receive a read receipt for every email you send:
- Select the โiRecepitMailโ icon in your Macโs menu bar.
- Select โPreferencesโฆโ
- Choose the โRead Receiptsโ tab.
- Select the โAutomatically request receiptsโ checkbox.
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