A more practical approach to using Outlook(Outlook XP, 2003, 2007)

               You are brushing through the mails in your inbox and the Email Client automatically marks a mail as ‘Read’ and removes its bold font even if the message was active in the reading pane for just a while. This is not practical since this can lead to important mails being overlooked.
               You can now put a stop to the annoying behavior of the programs: Open ‘Tools | Options’ and switch to the ‘Next’ tab. Click on the ‘Reading pane’ button and uncheck the ‘Mark item as read in case of new selection’ option in the next dialog. Enable the setting in the ‘Mark messages displayed in the reading pane as read’ instead. Here, the waiting time is set to fi ve seconds by default. This delay is usually suffi cient for scrolling in most of the cases. But you can increase the value in the input fi eld as well. Confi rm the open dialogs with ‘OK’.