New messages spontaneously marked read

[eewanco]

I've been using Fastmail for a few years and have really enjoyed it.

Last couple of days though I've been experiencing a weird problem. New messages are showing up as marked read even though I haven't read them. This has affected probably a dozen messages over the last couple of days. It's like someone is reading my mail, except I checked the login history and everything looks OK. No one had logged in during one period in which I saw this happen.

I have three machines using two software clients: One at work, one at home, and my phone. The two computers use Thunderbird and the phone uses MailDroid. None of these have been upgraded during the period when this appeared (and have been working fine), and as I said I saw messages marked read during a period when none of the clients logged in.

Has anyone seen this problem?

[n5bb]

No, I have not noticed any such problem. Here are some ideas:

• Your Option>Define Rules>File into folders rules can cause certain filed messages to be marked as Read.
• It's easy to accidentally have a mobile phone email client do odd things you didn't suspect.
• You might want to send yourself test messages in the Fastmail web interface, and see if they arrive read or unread.
• The default Mailbox listing folder message sort is by date/time the message is received. But you might have changed this to the date/time the message was sent. If so, this can confuse matters if the messages are delayed or if the sending date/time stamp is incorrect.
• An email client which is subscribed to folders via IMAP can move messages from the client to the Fastmail server. So if you move messages on the email client from another folder to the Inbox (or another subscribed folder), those messages will appear in your Inbox when you look at it in any other way. And those message might have been marked as read at the client before the move.
• In the Options>Folders screen, the Sharing/Access control button takes you to the Mailbox sharing screen. Here you can share one or more folders with other accounts which are set up to allow this with your account. Normally this is only for business or family accounts. But you might want to check that only your account has access to your folders. To do this on the Mailbox sharing screen:
  • Use the Add shared folder control to select a folder, and then click the Add share button.
  • You need to do this for all of your folders. You can use the Include subfolders checkbox to add all subfolders under a selected folder.
  • Then be sure that you are looking at all folders using the Folder shares to display links at the bottom of the list (if you have over 20 folders).
  • Look at the Currently Shared with Users column for each folder. If it shows anything other than only your account name, then that folder is being shared with another account.
  • If you see anything other than [full control] for a folder, then some control features for that folder have been changed from the default settings. For instance, control over the read flag might have been disabled.
• Of course, if you suspect that someone else might be accessing your account in some other manner than folder sharing, you should immediately change your main account password in Options>Account Preferences to a completely different and secure (long and complex) password. And clear out any old Options>Alternative Logins methods you might have set up.

Bill