When you click on an email summary in the left panel that is bold (“Unread”) then click on another one, the first one you clicked on does not change to normal text (“Read”). It seems that you have to click on an email, wait 10 seconds or so for it to change to normal text, then you can move on. If you press Ctrl-Q the change occurs immediately.
Is this the expected behavior? In most emails, if you click on the summary and then click on another, the first one changes immediately. I just tried this with Outlook (2016) and that’s the way it works.
eM Client has functions which allow you to choose how a message goes from Unread to Read. You can find them in Menu -> Tools -> Settings -> Mail -> Read. For setting the time see Mark messages read after displaying for ___ seconds.
I set the value to zero but for some reason it takes two seconds to go from bold to un-bold after clicking. Rereading the above, I see that it says “after displaying”. It takes a couple of seconds to display the email, so I guess that is the criteria…
You should check out Outlook and the built-in Windows 10 email client. I think they do it the right way IMHO. This is the use case for me: I see an email for 1-800-Flowers.com. The thumbnail says, “You’ve earned a $20 Savings Pass for November”. Not interested… So what I want to do is click it and go on to the next one. There could be 5 emails I don’t care about. I don’t want to wait for them to display – because I don’t care about them. I want to go click, click, click, click, click and basically mark them as unread.
Setting to zero seconds is better than the default but it could be better.
eM Client’s default setting is that it only downloads message headers. If the connection is slow then it might take a couple of seconds to load the whole message, which counts as “displaying”. As you’ve described, this is the time it takes to mark a message as unread. What we could recommend is going to Menu -> Tools -> Accounts, opening the IMAP tabs of the account(s) that you use and checking the “Download messages for offline use” option. Since the messages will be downloaded already, they should be marked as read immediately after clicking.
Thank you Maurice. I assume that checking that option would download every email in my Gmail account? There are some plusses and minuses to that.
FWIW, my current Internet speed is around 75 Mbps, which I would call fast (certainly not slow). I just clicked on 4 emails waiting for me to look at. Each one easily took two seconds to load. All had some sort of picture in it.
My humble opinion is that “mailbox zero” includes quickly setting unimportant emails to be “read” by clicking on the message summary and moving on. Looking at the initial content of the is not necessary to judge whether it’s worth reading or not.
Yes, it would download every e-mail in your account. Of course there are advantages and disadvantages to that, so it is up to you to consider what you’d prefer using. If you feel that looking at the summary is enough to determine whether a message is worth reading, have you maybe considered deleting these messages straight away? Or selecting them as you go through the Inbox and marking them as read all at once? In any case, we hope that you find a way of going about this that would be to your liking.
I got the same problem. Even if i delete the message, they show up in my trash as unread. I don’t want to download the messages to my computer in order to mark them.
We’re sorry the current setup isn’t to your liking. If it is the unread messages in Trash that is part of the issue for you, it is possible to use the ‘Mark All Messages as Read’ option, accessible by right clicking the relevant folder.