Apple Mail Mark messages and unread in Preview mode

Hello, As a new user to Mac swithcing over from Windows I must say its not that difficult to get use to the new OS. That being said it is clear that there small issues with Mail and Calendar that needs attention and specifically when it comes to integration with Google. Our organization uses Google Apps and we find the following issues. I have searched everywhere and simply cannot find a way around these. This post is only about the mail application (non-google related).

The mail applicaiton is great and would not mind using it instead of Outlook if it wasnt for one very irritating thing in that in the preview pane it marks a mail as read if you just preview the mail and not when you have actually read or handled the mail. In other mail clients (like Outlook for example) you can set a delay (like mark after its been previewed for x time) or only when its been opened (my preferred way) by double clikcing it. I see many suggestions and workaround but none solves the actual problem and many users complain about this. Some examples:

When you highlight a mail (its marked as read of course immediately) and you delete it the solution imdeiately highlight the next mail (and mark it as read) and you havent read it and you need to mark as unread which is not viable.

I have seen applications like TruePreview that solves this but these are not working on Mavericks. How do we solve this?