need to see if anyone else is experiencing this or anyone has a solution as it may cause me to stop using Thunderbird for my email if I cant resolve it.

There was an issue like this a while back that was traced to Bitdefender's antispam component. Do you have BD or another AV app that scans email? Also, is the mail being accessed on another device with the same accounts?

Thank you for your response. No I do not use Bitdefender. I only have Malware Bytes (free version) and I don't think it scans email at all

I only installed it on one computer to start with so I can test out the email service

Have you logged on to the webmail account via a browser and read the email ?

If you are using imap account then it will mark as read if you have opened and read the email via webmail. Basically, it was marked as read on server, so imap account will mirror what is on server.

I'm trying to think of any senarios where emails in imap can appear as already read.

Do you use a phone to read emails ? If that is imap then if you read an email it will mark as read on server and thus mark as read when email displayed in imap account in Thunderbird.

If it a pop account then it is possible the emails were marked as read on server when they were downloaded to pop account. So, in an imap account they will display as read.

Thanks for the attempts Toad-Hall. Appreciate the response, but no, I did not check the emails at all through webmail or through the phone. The one desktop version of thunderbird was the only one i downloaded as i was trying it out still to see if it would work for me. It kinda sucks but i think i might just have to go back to importing the emails into gmail instead.

Is there any chance you selected a folder eg: Inbox and then pressed some keys ?

For example: Thunderbird has loads of shortcuts and a 'Shift+C' would mark all as read in a selected folder without needing to select any emails.

Here is a link which mentions verious shortcut keys - maybe handy to bookmark as a future reference.

• https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/keyboard-shortcuts-thunderbird

A few more ideas: I have come across someone some time ago who was using an imap account connected to either a university or business - can't recall exactly and the server was marking emails as read when they were downloaded.

I've also come across someone who had previously used Outlook to access server for emails on an outlook server. They thought Outlook was no longer working but then discovered it was working in the background with an auto start when the user booted up computer and was downloading to a pop account which caused the server to mark popped emails as read. Then the Thunderbird imap account displayed emails marked as read automatically.

hmm, i can definitely say the problem is not related to the shortcut like "shift+c" as it is happening on its own with no input from myself (ig: when i get on the computer in the morning without touching anything, emails are already marked as read)

im not too adept technologically to understand what might be happening with the latter examples. I would not really be sure how to fix it if one of those scenarios was what was happening.