Note that the original intention was to start the countdown from the time the email main body is downloaded and displayed. It should not wait for all the linked images to be loaded too. We will test it and see if there’s any issue with that.
There’s definitely an issue with that. The message isn’t marked read until every element in the message is downloaded completely. No need to test - It’s a fact.
I am not convinced that eM Client employees know enough about how their product functions.
Thank you for the reply, Filip. Yes, it would be great if it worked in the way you describe. But sadly it doesn’t - Karl and Gary are right: when the “mark as read” preference is set to zero, the message is not marked as read until all the elements have finished downloading.
I don’t know how it behaves with non-zero values for the “mark as read” preference, as I haven’t tested it.
It works the same. If you have the delay set to 5 seconds, it waits till the message is completely downloaded, then begins the 5 second countdown before marking the message as read.
Yup, this is counter-intuitive and different than the way any other email client works. Once the headers are downloaded you should be able to mark it as read without downloading every element in the email…
Not a bug but a fundamental problem with the way your program works. Should be easy enough to fix though. I suspect it would take what, one line of code? Several lines if you wanted to make it a preference that people can toggle on or off. 
That’s good to know. So at least we know exactly how it works now, and we know exactly how we would like it to work.
eM Client team : what is your position on this? Accept or reject?
A year later and this is still the one thing that bothers me every time I use eM client. I still hope that it gets changed to mark as read without looking for elements to be downloaded.
From what Filip said above, it appears that it should already work that way - the way I proposed.
I guess we will have to wait and see what his next comment is, if any.