Help tweaking a setting in Thunderbird mail client

While I can see what you are requesting I have to say that I hope they don't modify the current behavior myself! When I click on a message it is because I want to read it- and am having trouble understanding why I would click on it if I didn't want to read it in the first place- in other words why I wouldn't just click only on those I wanted to read.

I realize I am missing something in your desire to do so, so don't take this wrong. I am sure you have your reasons- but I just hope they don't change it to some thing where I have to double click on them or command-click on them or something to just read them! I just have never seen a method to achieve the results you are looking for.

The current method seems right to me- in that I read the message and it is marked "read". If, after reading it, I decide that I would like to respond to it later I do one of two things- either hit respond to open a new document which I then immediately close so it is saved in Drafts as a highlighted message for later, or just go into the Message menu and click the "Mark-->As Read" to take away the checkmark and have it highlighted again.

 

I'd like to suggest a place to look, but forgive me if it's not on your T-bird. My 10 hour old iMac is still in its box - I've been clearing a space on my desk next to the PC whose contents will be sucked dry and moved to the iMac + Fusion. I was chilling for a few minutes and searched for "thunderbird" to get ideas on how I'd handle email on the iMac.

On the PC, the Options / Advanced / General has a check box for "Wait __ seconds before marking a message as read". If you use that, you could get a grace period to move the selection before it marks the email as "Read". Also, between The "Subject" and "Sender" columns is a dot that if clicked changes between "read" and "unread". I don't know if these are in the Mac version, but you could check.