How-To Geek
Make Outlook 2007 Mark Items as Read When Viewed in Reading Pane
One of my friends contacted me a while back asking why the default setting in Outlook 2007 is to not mark items as read until you switch to a different email, which leaves the new mail notification sitting in the system tray even though you’ve clearly read the email.
Turns out there’s a very simple setting for this, where you can mark items as read once you’ve viewed them instead of when the selection changes to a different email.
Just go to Tools \ Options and then click on the Other tab. Click the Reading Pane button to bring up the options.\
Just select the checkbox on “Mark items as read when viewed in the Reading Pane”. You’ll notice that you can’t also select the “Mark item as read when selection changes” box, which seems a little silly, but it’s not important. You might also want to change the number of seconds in this dialog. It doesn’t usually take me 5 seconds to read an email, especially when most of them aren’t important.
Remember that you can always mark an item as read by using the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Q, which is really the fastest way to mark items as read.
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Comments (56)
Programmer by day, geek by night, The Geek, also known as Lowell Heddings, spends all his free time bringing you fresh geekery on a daily basis. You can follow him on Google+ if you'd like.
- Published 07/3/07
Thanks much – this is what I needed.
Thanks. This was very helpful
thank you again! that has been annoying the **** out of me for weeks!
You took the words right out of my mouth Naman :D
Well that’s intuitive for you.
Thanks! Very helpful!
You know, the last time I had to do this was about a year or so ago, when first setting up my Outlook profile when OL2007 first came out. New job, new computer and whoa, how did I do that before???
Thank you for posting the obvious for folks like me who tend to forget.
I don’t know why they made this option so difficult to find in the new version of Office.
It used to be 1 click from the reading pane, which is why it was never an annoying issue before…
Thank you very very much! Knew I could do it but had to remember how to.
Thanks for the answer! Once again, it’s faster to Google for an answer on a Microsoft setting then battle Microsoft’s unintuitive UI with settings scattered throughout a completely bizarre labyrinth of different menus, windows, buttons, and tabs.
Thank you so much! This is exactly what I’ve been struggling to find today!
Me too.. :-) I used to have this setting with Outlook 2003 but didn’t find it in Outlook 2007 – so, great, thanks!
Thank you so much for this, i have been searching thru Outlook all bloody day for this.. why hide it?? THANK YOU THANK YOU
thank you thank you :-)
Yes!!!!
Thanks it’s very useful for me.
Thanks. That’s what I needed. I wonder why they made this the default setting and not the other way around. Annoying!!!
thanks!
Thank you so much for this – this has really been irritating me!!! Yay… :)
I too found this extremely helpful. Thank you!
Great post! Straight to the point, exactly what I was after. The hardest part was figuring what to type in google to pinpoint this issue exactly…
I found myself ranting about how much I hated Outlook for this exact reason, and now my hatred is gone! Thank you!
thanks, that was rather annoying :)
Great tip. Great website. Been getting a lot of solutions from here in the past while. Many thanks!
Anyone have an idea what to do when all those options are ‘grayed-out’ ? When the reading pane options come up, I can’t click on any of them.
Fantastic, simple and effective answer, easily to follow. Keep it up
Gracias!!!
Era preciso lo que necesitaba
Thanks so much. I have Microsoft Exchange syncing my emails with my iPhone, so I was getting really annoyed when I would read my email in the preview pane, and then five minutes (or whatever) my phone would beep telling me I have new mail because it had remained bold. SO thanks, you’re a lifesaver! It is so much easier to fix this problem in Outlook Express….which until six months ago I had almost a fifteen years experience using! I am loving Outlook and the seamless integration with my phone and webmail etc. Very cool.
Thank you so much for this it was driving me insane! I knew it was there i just couldn’t find it ! :-)
Rather useful indeed. If only they’d obey their own GUI rules with the settings dialog and allow both CHECKBOXES to be enabled (i.e. time-based AND selection change). Instead it behaves as though it were a radio button.
Of course, the space bar option is totally misleading and using it to view messages is unintuitive and unpredictable to the point of being cryptic: sometimes the space bar will pagedown, other times it will skip to the next email message. How will you know which action will happen? well, that depends on the length of the email, the size of your screen and reading window, and what direction the wind blows at 4pm each Thursday in Geneva.
Thank you so much for posting this.
As most people have said, this was so annoying until I got the answer here and rectified it.
Keep on posting good stuff such as this :)
This helped. Simple and quick.Thanks to the author.
Thanks. Very helpful.
thank you!!!!
Thank you so much, I was looking for this a while ago
Very helpful!!
Brilliant thanks! Very helpful!!
Thanks a lot !!
Thanks a lot,
MS forgot basic functionality.
Just wanted to post for Outlook 2010 as well. It is similar, but to get to the option, you must go File->Options->Advanced->Outlook panes->Reading Pane
thanks a lot, it helped me a lot
Thanks a lot! Got here through a google search and this is exactly what I have been looking for.
Thank you very much, but it is not really simple and “Just” as you think.
You are not talking about 1 – 2 steps but 4 !
Each step have multiple options and leads to hundreds options
which almost impossible to check.
That’s exactly what I was looking for. Thanks !
It Helped alot, THANKS!
Thanks a lot!!!
Thank you! Been driving me nuts!
thanks… that resolved my issue.
This only i expected from u team Thax buddy…………….
thx the resloved the issues
After 4 years, this article is still getting accolades. Well, I’ll add one more: Exactly what I was looking for and needed. My current client uses Office-2007 and we are stuck with its quirks. How like Microsoft to create a great product but sabotage it in little ways, like putting this setting in [Reading Pane] rather than the more intuitive [Preferences]->[Email]. (This shall not constitute an endorsement of the quirks in Office-2010 ;-)
perfect if you have outlook in another language you don’t know. thank you:)
Thank you! This is the first link of about 20 that actually answered the question and worked.
And as a side comment, I was looking to do the exact opposite, it was marking things that I had not glanced at yet, I receive over 100 emails daily and if I had arrowed up it marke the item as read so I did not realize it was one I had skipped to come bak too!
I wanted to turn off the automatic mark-as-read also. Wasted time yesterday looking in Email Preferences (because that would make sense), and spent about five seconds today with Google search and this fantastically helpful post! Thank you!
is there a keyboard shortcut to turn it back on? or does outlook do this itsself? i turn this off whenever i set a new employee up, but twice now someone has turned it back on – and they dont know how they did it. it must be a keyboard shortcut that toggles this on and off??