Microsoft has been radically transforming Skype in the recent months. The company has added a lot of bright colours, GIFs, emojis, encrypted conversations, and other “modern” features to keep Skype up with the times. This week, the firm started testing another modern-ish feature for communication: read receipts.

Read receipts aren’t anything new, they have been around for years, in fact. But for Skype — they are. I believe this is the first time Microsoft is bringing read receipts to Skype, so it’s kind of a big deal. The company is starting off by testing read receipts on Skype across all platforms with preview build 8.26.76. Once you install the latest build, you will be able to see when someone has seen your messages, and send read receipts back to other members in a conversation. For groups, the feature only works if the group has less than 20 members. By the way, you won’t be able to receive read receipts from someone who isn’t on the latest preview build,  which means you may have to wait weeks or months to even be able to utilize this feature if your contacts haven’t installed the latest Skype.

For those worrying — yes, Skype does let you disable read receipts, or temporarily disable sending read receipts by going Invisible, but that means you won’t get to see when people have read your messages, either. And that’s really a huge trade-off that exists across all messaging and social network platforms.

In other news, I can no longer avoid replying to messages from Paul and Brad.

Tagged with Skype, Skype Preview