I'm a diehard unix-head, but have to use Windows at work, and specifically, I have to use Outlook. I currently have a big peeve with Outlook: how it marks (or doesn't mark) messages as read.

By default, Outlook does not mark messages in the "preview pane" (i.e., where you actually read the emails, unless for some perverse reason you open them in their own window) as read, ever. There are two optional changes to this behaviour. The first is to mark them read after they have been selected for a few seconds. This ought to be the right thing; however, if this mode is selected, and you keep an empty inbox, Outlook will mark your new messages as read even when it is minimized, meaning there is no possibility that you have actually read the message. This fools with new mail notification to no end.

The other optional behaviour is to only mark messages read when you move off of them. Useful sometimes, but still not the right thing. I find myself often having to manually mark messages read before moving them to my Archive folder.

I doubt there's anyway to fix Outlook's behaviour; does anyone have something I could use as a workaround? A macro to mark a message read and move it to the Archive folder would do the trick. If it could be bound to a key --- does Outlook even support custom keybindings?