Thunderbird Tip: Time Delay for Marking Messages as Read

October 8, 2010 | Author Russ

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Mozilla Thunderbird is a great mail client for Mac users that find Apple Mail to be too limiting. Also, because it's cross-platform, people who use Windows at work and a Mac at home can use the same email client in both places.

One useful feature in Thunderbird is the ability to control how long a message is viewed before it is marked as read. This is handy if you are browsing through your inbox, but don't want to change the status of your messages until you've had a change to really read them.

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Tags: Apple Mail, inbox, Mac, Macintosh, Thunderbird

Mark11125

I just don’t understand why there isn’t an option for “never mark messages as read unless opened”. That seems to make more sense to me and I’m really tired of having emails marked as read simply because the email happens to get selected and displayed in the preview pane. That is NOT reading in my opinion and has caused me to “lose” emails that come in and I don’t realize they are really new.
http://russ.alman.us/ Russ Alman

As far as I know, every desktop email client assumes when you are using preview mode that your message is read once it displays on the screen. That’s why I like this option in Thunderbird.

You might try just increasing the value in Thunderbird to something really high, like 99 seconds. Then it should stay “unread” unless you leave it on the screen for a long time. If it’s on the screen that long, chances are you’ll be reading it