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When I click on an e-mail it will leave it as unread instead of marking it as read.

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I am in my inbox and it has my read and unread emails. When I click on an unread one it does not change it to read...I know that is used to do that. Is it something in the settings?

I am in my inbox and it has my read and unread emails. When I click on an unread one it does not change it to read...I know that is used to do that. Is it something in the settings?

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re : I want to have my email open all day and when new email arrive stay as unread until I click on it

The settings I advised do exactly that. Thunderbird assumes all new is unread and unopened. When you open the email it will be marked as read.

There are differnt ways to open an email. If you have the 'Message Pane' enabled, then when you single click on an email in the list, this is a signal to open that email and display it in the lower Message Pane. This email is now considered opened and therefore being read by you. So, it is marked as read. If you choose to double click on email regardless of whether the Message Pane is enabled or not, then the email will open in a new tab. This email is now considered opened and therefore being read by you. So, it is marked as read.

If you do not have the 'Message Pane' enabled and you single click on an email in the list it will not open and display, so therefore will not be marked as read.

Whilst some people are happy to open emails via the more lengthy method (double clicking), it is not good practise to single click on items if you have no intention of executing a command as you could develop this as a habit which may have unfortunate results.

The settings I advised will produce the above results. You can moderate the settings to achieve different results:

  • If opened then mark as read immediately.
  • If opened then mark as read after a short period.
  • If opened never mark as read until I manually select it as marked as read.
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'Menu icon' > 'Options' > 'Options' > 'Display' > 'Advanced' tab select: 'Automatically mark messages as read' select: 'Immediately on display' click on 'OK'

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I do not want it to be read immediately upon opening. I want to have my email open all day and when new email arrive stay as unread until I click on it....Right after I click on it I would like it to be marked as unread.

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Seçilmiş Həll

re : I want to have my email open all day and when new email arrive stay as unread until I click on it

The settings I advised do exactly that. Thunderbird assumes all new is unread and unopened. When you open the email it will be marked as read.

There are differnt ways to open an email. If you have the 'Message Pane' enabled, then when you single click on an email in the list, this is a signal to open that email and display it in the lower Message Pane. This email is now considered opened and therefore being read by you. So, it is marked as read. If you choose to double click on email regardless of whether the Message Pane is enabled or not, then the email will open in a new tab. This email is now considered opened and therefore being read by you. So, it is marked as read.

If you do not have the 'Message Pane' enabled and you single click on an email in the list it will not open and display, so therefore will not be marked as read.

Whilst some people are happy to open emails via the more lengthy method (double clicking), it is not good practise to single click on items if you have no intention of executing a command as you could develop this as a habit which may have unfortunate results.

The settings I advised will produce the above results. You can moderate the settings to achieve different results:

  • If opened then mark as read immediately.
  • If opened then mark as read after a short period.
  • If opened never mark as read until I manually select it as marked as read.
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I think the problem I was having was I had mozilla open on anther computer. So once I closed out of that and set the settings to how you have said it has been working. Thank you!

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If you use imap then an email opened on computer A will show as opened on the server, so when another computer accesses same imap account, that email will be seen as read.

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Ok yep it is set as imap so that was what was happening.

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Settings worked as told by the contributor. Thanks.