One of the new features that came with the release of iOS 5 is iMessage. The point of iMessage is to give you a more “real-time” text conversation. It does this by giving you visual confirmation that your text has been delivered and read and will even show you when the other person is typing. Being that all of this is done over your data connection (3G or WiFi), you’re able to send an unlimited amount of texts at no cost.

The problem with iMessage is that, by default, the “send read receipts” option is disabled. Sure, if you don’t want people to know whether or not you’ve read their message then that’s fine, but if you’d like to take full advantage of what iMessage offers then you have to enable the feature yourself. Personally, I think it should be enabled by default as it’s an advertised feature; I feel that they’re essentially cutting themselves short (and defeating iMessage’s purpose) by not enabling it out of the box.

To turn it on, simply go to Settings -> Messages and turn “send read receipts” on as shown in the picture above.