Delete Apple Mail without it being displayed & marked as read

Right-click and select Delete from the contextual menu.

Why do you care if it gets marked read?

The message at the top of the list is going to be displayed, no matter what you do. Otherwise, I can't reproduce your problem. If I select a message and then right-click another one, the second message is not displayed.

You can prevent spammers from being notified that you opened their message by deselecting Mail > Preferences > Viewing > Display remote images in HTML messages.

No need to worry about that. Do you have Mail set up to not automatically load images?

I hate spam too. I've created a few rules to help weed them out and move them to the Junk box. They will show unread when you open the junk folder as long as you don't select any. Right click on the folder to erase completely. I move them to junk instead of straight delete to make sure no good ones get caught in it. But so far, all are worthless.

This won't get all, but it will get a lot. They are very effective though.

You ran out of helpful (only 2 allowed). If you find that Glenn solved your problem, you can mark his that way. While it didn't quite answer your question, it seems like it might have solved what you really wanted.

I've just created those in the past few weeks and so far they are catching a great deal of the spam I get. In fact, much better than I expected. I'm still testing and tweeking. I've change the first rule to Any Recipient to see if that will get more of the spam without junking wanted email.

In SL, I had a rule where if a recipient contained a comma (which denoted multiple addresses), it would delete them. I figured if someone I didn't know was including me in a multiple listing, then it was junk. But, Lion will not recognize the comma or any other punctuation and I can't get that to work.

I'll be testing and looking for any others I can add if too many others get through. Once I get a rule to work like I want and know they're working to perfection, I'll change the actions to just delete them.

Try them out and see if they fit your needs. I mark them different colors to know which rules does what action in case good emails get affected and I'll know which to change.

As far as the discussions, I think the options are that you can only mark 2 posts helpful and one solved. But I appreciate it though.

I have one that looks for .gif attachments. The emails that send a picture of the text to avoid the spam filters were generally gifs. I haven't seen any in a while, though. My ISP may be filtering those or they've slowed down. If you are getting many of those, adding a rule to move those may help.