10.7: Adjust Mail's delay for marking items read in conversation view

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Feb 15, '12 07:30:00AM • Contributed by: jlukas

By default, Mail will mark a message in a conversation read after a short delay. To adjust the short delay (for example, to remove it), use the following command (replacing 0 with the desired time in seconds):

defaults write com.apple.Mail MarkAsReadDelay 0

To revert to the default:

defaults delete com.apple.Mail MarkAsReadDelay

As far as I can tell, there isn't a way to affect the delay for single messages.

[crarko adds: Nice.]

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10.7: Adjust Mail's delay for marking items read in conversation view
Authored by: fitzage on Feb 15, '12 08:35:30AM

If you use Mail Act-On (and you should), it has a preference for this which works on single messages. And sometimes on conversations, but that's a bit more quirky I think.

10.7: Adjust Mail's delay for marking items read in conversation view
Authored by: digitol on Feb 15, '12 12:31:56PM

Thanks for this!

10.7: Adjust Mail's delay for marking items read in conversation view
Authored by: blgrace on Feb 15, '12 04:45:21PM

Great hint, this has been bugging me for a while.

10.7: Adjust Mail's delay for marking items read in conversation view
Authored by: fmt on Feb 15, '12 05:39:06PM

Is there any way of setting "Mark as Read" to off?

10.7: Adjust Mail's delay for marking items read in conversation view
Authored by: jtburgess on Jul 04, '12 04:09:24PM

I'm running Lion (10.7.4)

I quit Mail, then entered:
$ defaults write com.apple.Mail MarkAsReadDelay 30

in Terminal, and verified it with:
$ defaults read com.apple.Mail MarkAsReadDelay
30

Then restarted Mail.
It still marks messages as read as soon as I select them.
What am I missing?

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