Change how quickly email messages are marked as Read in Windows Mail

When new emails are downloaded in Windows Mail, they are all unread by default: when you open an email to read it, it is marked as read either immediately, or after a number of seconds that you can determine through Windows Mail options. How soon you want an email message to be marked as read depends on a number of things, including your own personal preference. In this tutorial, we'll show you how quickly you can mark emails as read in Windows Mail.

Change how fast an email message is marked as read

Follow these steps to configure the Read / Unread status duration:

• If needed, open Windows Mail
• Click on the Tools menu, and choose "Options"
• When the Windows Mail options dialog opens, click on the "Read" tab
• This group of settings is subdivided into three sections; the first group, labeled "Reading Messages", contains a "Mark message read after displaying for ... seconds" checkbox.
• Notice that the same line includes a numerical field with counter arrows: this field allows you to customize for how many seconds an email message will be Unread before it becomes Read. (Also, remember that you can always make a read email Unread by right-clicking on it, and choosing "Mark as Unread" from the context menu.)
• Check this checkbox, and enter the number of seconds during which you want a new email message to remain unread (manually type it, or use the arrow buttons).
• Once you have configured the number of seconds during which an email should remain "Unread", click on the OK button to return to Windows Mail.
• Note that this setting is not retroactive (won't affect emails already marked as Read), but it will take effect immediately: the next time you select an email that is currently unread, Windows Mail will wait for the number of seconds you just customized before marking that particular message as read.

There you go! This is literally all it takes to configure the number of seconds your emails will remain unread in Windows Mail. You can go back and change that setting as many times as you like, and it will take effect the next time you come across an unread email.

Tip: some email messages may be downloaded "already marked as read"; this has nothing to do with Windows Mail itself, but with the fact that a new email may have already been read by you or someone else on the server, and already have been automatically marked as Read the by the webmail client used to check those emails.