I am lucky enough to own a tablet of each breed, and my TouchPad is by far my favorite. Sure there are less apps by an order of magnitude, but HP nailed most of the core services. For example, mark all as read -- I've yet to find this basic feature on my Honeycomb tab or iPad.
"Mark read" is a broken interaction anyway. You only ever use it when you haven't read the message.
So why do people do it? I do it to clear out messages that aren't worth reading, to get that number of unread emails in my Inbox folder down to 0.
Why do I care about unread messages? What I'm really worried about are unseen messages, and the set of unread messages contains these.
"Read/unread" and "Seen/unseen" are really just labels anyway, right? These could be automatically applied on seeing the message in a list view and on reading the message.
Now I have some sort of cool multiple-select label filter in place, and all I need to do is select the "Inbox" and "unseen" labels to get to email that I need to peruse. Every time I look at this label combination, all mail is marked "seen" and I never have to check off messages or apply a "read" state to messages that I have not read.
Notmuch (notmuchmail.org) gets close to what I want. I want to see its ideas adopted by the major webmail/mobile interfaces, so I don't have to contend with the legacy of email sorting.
I don't know, I feel like you're over-thinking it. "Mark as Read" is exactly that- "mark this as if I have read it, even though I have not". I don't see how it's broken.
The problem is that I can no longer distinguish between mail that I have read and mail that I simply don't care about. The solution I presented requires no explicit interaction and gives me this granularity. Sure, I can manually apply a label in Gmail, but that's explicit once more (and requires far too many clicks for such a simple operation).
> I can no longer distinguish between mail that I have read and mail that I simply don't care about.
Why is this distinction important? When do you need to browse through mail that you've read? If you need to find something you can just search for it by content or individual.
The problem with automatically applying a 'seen' label, is that it forces you to to immediately filter through all your new mail. You can't stop halfway because then some 'unseen' mail will get marked 'seen'.
Just to add to the over-thinking: I find myself marking things as read when I've gleaned their meaning from the subject, without instructing the app to display the entire message body.
