You give them a call.

Email, IM, text messages are asynchronous media. You can't expect people to drop what they are doing to answer you. Read / Received receipts mean the message was delivered and (possibly) displayed on some screen. It does not mean it was looked at, read, or understood.

What does this mean for you?

It's worth accounting for some delay in your communications. Other people have their own schedules and what every email, text and IM is at heart, is a request to wedge some of the sender's time into the recipients' schedule.

If, on the other hand, you have a deadline, you can include that in your email (it would be great if you could respond by X because of $reason), where $reason is something likely to be interpreted as reasonable by the other party.

You give them a call.

Email, IM, text messages are asynchronous media. You can't expect people to drop what they are doing to answer you. Read / Received receipts mean the message was delivered and (possibly) displayed on some screen. It does not mean it was looked at, read, or understood.

What does this mean for you?

It's worth accounting for some delay in your communications. Other people have their own schedules and what every email, text and IM is at heart, is a request to wedge some of the sender's time into the recipients' schedule. You're not in control of that.

If, on the other hand, you have a deadline, you can include that in your email (it would be great if you could respond by X because of $reason), where $reason is something likely to be interpreted as reasonable by the other party.