Does anyone here know how to keep an email program from deciding that a message has been read without it being opened and read? I’ve had this problem with both Outlook Express and Windows Live Mail. They both will randomly decide that a message has been opened when in fact it has not, and it will then disappear from the list of unread messages.
Is your wife secretly reading your email?
This could happen if you have multiple clients connecting to the same IMAP server. A phone and a computer, say. Or Outlook Express and a webmail client.
If you’ve got any kind of preview/reading pane in your mail client (so you can preview the content of the message just by selecting it) this often marks messages as read.
If you’re got a smartphone that’s synchronising mail with the same mailbox, that may be marking messages as read.
^^^ some of the email programs can turn off or adjust the delay on marking previewed emails as read. It’s worth checking under Options.
Thanks for the replies. However, i may have solved the problem. In OE, it takes a double click to open an email. A single click will highlight it but not open it. It seems that if OE is closed with one of the messages in the inbox highlighted, that message will be considered “read” the next time OE is accessed. We shall see if making sure the no message is highlighted on closing will cure the problem, but so far it looks good.