How do you disable mail marking messages as read?

I've stopped using Apple Mail application for this very reason.

The good news is that Thunderbird does everything Apple mail does and then some. All of the features I used with Apple mail like Send Later, filtering message based on regular expressions, etc can all be added as an extension.

If you are like me you get your mail from multiple client machines, and iPhone, iPad and the like. So I use IMAP to get my mail so it's not pulled in to one machine or the other. But IMAP and Thunderbird work perfectly together.

Seems like a lot to do to turn off automatic mark as read but the way Apple mail handles that drove me to the point of wanting to throw hammers at glass. It's so annoying. After asking them for 5+ years to change this I gave up asking. They won't change it.

If you still want to use filtering you can run both mail clients at the same time. Just run mail in the background and run Thunderbird in the foreground.

Good luck!

Thunderbird has it's own problems, the interface is from the late 90's, it doesn't integrate with MacOS ( no click an drag into TB feature ), and it hasn't gotten new features for a long time. it only gets stability and security updates.

Airmail 3 is a much better option, Airmail 2 was pretty buggy so don't use that. Herr are done reviews comparing *modern* email clients.

https://www.slant.co/versus/1950/1951/~mozilla-thunderbird_vs_airmail

https://thesweetsetup.com/apps/favorite-email-client-os-x/

I don't want any more features or any type of integration. I just don't want the computer to tell me when a message is read.

It seems like every e-mail client suffers in it's own special way. I just don't understand why Apple can't allow me to make my own mind up when I decide a message has been read. It's not too much to ask.

Thanks for the links. I wish I could say I'd pay money for another client I'll have to learn and then find out it's deficiencies after the fact. But not gonna do it until Thunderbird runs it's course. So far, it's been running perfectly in this envionment on multiple machines.

And I get to decide when a message is read.

Unfortunately, Mail marks every previewed mail as read. The only way around this is to not preview mail. To "fix" the preview problem, take the preview window divider and slide it all the way to the right so it is not showing anything. Then your messages will not be marked as read when you scroll or arrow down through them. The list should still show the first few lines of the email and I use that to see which messages I want to mark read. To read, double click the message or press return when highlighted.

I agree with you completely. Why can’t Apple let us set this simple parameter. I also stick with thunderbird, does everything I want and highly configurable.

I'm with you. I use an alternate mail client too for the most part. You can leave your Apple Mail Feedback here. With enough requests, maybe Apple will add this option someday. Maybe.

You cannot change the behavior.

If you disable the Message window by dragging the divider all the way to the right, it will only mark them if your double-click and open them in another window.