Thank you, Maurice.
I get your reasoning, and I completely understand the logic behind it.
I’ve noticed that this same request - or very similar variants - has appeared several times before, which does suggest an underlying issue somewhere. It seems that the real problem is the delay in marking an email as “read”.
It takes well under a second to decide an email is spam and hit the delete button, and it seems that eM Client isn’t always able to keep up with the user, despite having the settings as described in the original post.
Could you perhaps persuade the developers to look at the root cause of this?
As a software developer myself, I have two suggestions. Firstly, to investigate if there is any blocking anywhere which can cause a delay in marking a message as read even with the settings described above. I wonder if it might be in the rendering of the downloaded images. Perhaps the rendering could be offloaded to a background thread?
Secondly, for those users who prefer not to download the email body until it is clicked upon, allow them to delete a message before the body has fully downloaded, and in those circumstances only, consider that email to be read.
The reason I believe this to be feasible is because Outlook handles this scenario correctly, with far fewer (usually none) “unread” messages finding their way into Trash.
Oh, one final point: you could still implement the option as requested, but default it to “off”. You could even show a pop-up (or similar) explaining the risk of setting it to “on”. After all, it’s the user’s decision if they are happy to risk emails going to Trash that they didn’t actually read. Personally I’d set it to “on”, despite the theoretical risk.
Thanks again, Maurice, for taking the time to listen. It is very much appreciated.