When I started using the email app Newton a few years ago, it wasn’t for the read receipts. What I liked most was its simple and clean design, its quick syncing across mobile and desktop devices, its handy features such as snoozing and scheduling and the fact its native Windows app wasn’t terrible.

Before long, though, I started noticing the little checkmarks next to every outgoing email, signifying whether the message was read (blue checkmark) or unread (gray checkmark). Pretty soon I was obsessing over those indicators, even setting up push notifications to find out when people had seen my most urgent missives. Eventually, read receipts became table stakes in my mind for any potential Newton alternative.

“Table stakes” is also how Superhuman founder and CEO Rahul Vohra recently described a similar feature in his own email app. Superhuman has become the talk of the tech world thanks to a recent New York Times profile on how email obsessives happily pay $30 per month for the service, but the positive press soon turned to backlash over the app’s default use of read receipts. Mike Davidson, a vice president at InVision, led the charge on his personal blog, describing all the ways one might abuse this email superpower.

Please select this link to read the complete article from Fast Company.