Message flagged !!

Might you yourself have unknowingly and inadvertently flagged them? Two ways to do that: if you have customized your Mail's toolbar you might have inadvertently clicked on the red flag when a message was highlighted. Or, if you have not customized Mail's toolbar so don't have the red flag icon in your toolbar, you may have somehow managed to inadvertently type ⇧⌘L while the message was highlighted.

Message flags are meant to be nothing more than a way for the user to mark something so (s)he knows that it requires further action on his/her part. Doesn't really mean anything to Mail.app per se; it's just for the benefit of the end user's office productivity.

If Mail is really doing it on its own, it shouldn't be. I used to have issues with previously read messages marking themselves as unread; just an annoying "feature" of Tiger Mail. I haven't had that happen to me on Leopard Mail yet. Maybe this is a new "feature" of Leopard Mail? Or maybe it's an IMAP SERVER issue beyond your control?

Hello Frank:

When you send a new message, there is a small drop down field to the right of "signature." In that field, one can indicate the priority of the message.

Barry

Oh! I see, now. The messages weren't flagged at all; as Barry said, you somehow managed to get the message priority set to "high". That dropdown menu of which he speaks has a single exclamation mark for routine priority (the default condition), a dash for low priority, and double exclamation marks for high priority.

Still, as far as what does it mean, Mail.app and all the smtp servers and intervening routers along the way don't care; it's not like messages get placed higher or lower in a queue or anything before being transmitted from router to router or anything like that; all it does is provide an indicator to the recipient reading the message that you thought the message you wrote was important.

Now, if you don't have a priority field being displayed in your new message composition window, when you are composing a new message, click on the small rectangle at the lower left of your message header region, click "Customize" and checkbox the fields ("Priority" being one of them) you might want, then click OK.

If you haven't had the message priority drop down menu displayed, sorry, I cannot proffer any scenarios of how you might have inadvertently marked such a message as high priority; it would have to be a pretty deliberate action of going under "Message" in the menu bar, mousing over "Mark" and then selecting "High Priority" from the subsequent popup menu; there are no keyboard equivalents. I, personally, have neither experienced nor read about others having a problem like this, where Mail.app was randomly assigning priorities to sent messages without user intervention.