How To Prevent Emails From Being Marked As Read In Shared Mailbox?

Question

How To Prevent Emails From Being Marked As Read In Shared Mailbox?

Ng, Yung 20

Greetings, everyone!

We have a shared functional mailbox that we each monitor. That shared mailbox is opened in Outlook along with our personal mailbox. The problem is if someone opens an email sent to the shared mailbox, it is marked read for everyone. I searched this forum and tried the solutions from the previous posts (i.e., changing the Message Handling settings not to automatically mark the email as read, not marking it as read unless I specifically mark it) but it does not work. Is there anything else I can try? We are missing requests sent to the shared mailbox because we don't see any unread emails. (Before you ask, the easy/manual way of asking people not to mark the email as read unless they personally addressed it, also has not worked.) Please and thank you!

Katherine S 0 Reputation points

2026-08-11T16:49:03.05+00:00

There was a way for this to work. I have been a 2nd on several Csuite email accounts through the years and always had it set so when I opened emails they did not show as read for the other person. Recently, maybe with an update, this changed and while searching to figure out how to turn it back on I found this question. If I figure it out, I'll update this comment.

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Katherine S 0 Reputation points

2026-08-11T16:49:03.05+00:00

There was a way for this to work. I have been a 2nd on several Csuite email accounts through the years and always had it set so when I opened emails they did not show as read for the other person. Recently, maybe with an update, this changed and while searching to figure out how to turn it back on I found this question. If I figure it out, I'll update this comment.

Answer 1

Vasil Michev 127.9K MVP Volunteer Moderator

There is no way to have a per-user (per-delegate) read status for items in shared mailboxes, if anyone (cough AI cough) tells you otherwise, they're lying :)

You can either look for some third-party add-ins that might help, work with your users and see if you can update the process (i.e. use Categories/Flags instead of the "read" status), or consider using Microsoft 365 Groups instead (which do keep per-user status, but are otherwise missing many features that you might be used to with a shared mailbox).

Ng, Yung 20 Reputation points

2026-02-19T17:19:39.01+00:00

Thanks for your response! I'll have to look into the Groups and see if it will work for our team.