Read receipts ("blue ticks")
The check marks next to a sent message: one for sent, two grey for delivered, two blue for read — and what an export can and can’t say about them.
A single check mark means the message left the sender’s phone; two grey checks mean it arrived on the recipient’s; two blue checks mean it was opened and read — unless the recipient has turned read receipts off in settings, in which case it never turns blue at all, and the sender has no way of knowing whether that’s why. A text chat export doesn’t actually carry any of these tick states — they’re a live app-interface detail, not something written into the exported file — so a chat-analysis tool can describe reply timing but has no way to know whether an unanswered message was ever actually seen.
Example
A long reply-wait time in the data could mean the message sat unread for hours, or it could mean it was read immediately and simply not answered right away — an export alone can’t tell those two apart.
Frequently asked questions
Can a chat export show whether a message was read?+
No — read status lives in WhatsApp’s live app interface, not in the exported text file, so no analysis built from an export can recover it.
If someone turns off read receipts, do they still see other people’s?+
No — WhatsApp ties the setting to both directions: turning off your own read receipts also hides everyone else’s from you, in every chat, not selectively.