How to change the options for marking an email as read in Outlook

Outlook is by far the most widely used and trusted tool used by users to browse emails. By default, when you click an email, Outlook marks it as read. Also, if you click on the space, the selected email will be marked as read.

This could be a problem, because you may have skimmed through the emails without reading them. If you come back later, since the emails are already marked as read, it’s hard to keep track of what you’ve actually read.

Good ! the good news is that you can change this default behavior. You can configure the behavior to mark the email as read, only when you double-click the email to open and read it.

If you want to change the default settings in your Outlook, just try the steps below.

Steps to follow to change the option to give an email as read

1. Open the Outlook app.

2. Click on the Archive from the top menu options.

3. Click Options.

4. The Outlook Options window opens. From the left side, click Mail.

5. Scroll down and find the perspective panels section. Click on the reading pane button.

6. Mark off the option Marks the item as read when the selection changes.

7. Mark off the option Single key reading using the space bar.

8. Click on the OK in the Reading Pane window.

9. In the Outlook Options window, click the OK button.

Once this is done, the emails will be marked as read-only once you double-click the email to open and read it.

That’s it.

We hope this short article has been informative. Please comment and let us know if this helped.

Thank you for reading.