IMAP - Invisible mode? Can I view an IMAP account without affecting "read" status?

I share an email account with someone for a website project, at the moment I have it set up as POP but then its hard to tell who has replied to what and who has read what.

Is there a way for me to be able to see an IMAP account, but not affect the "read" status of emails?

Some clients, Outlook for example, allow you to set a delay before marking a message as read. So you could set this to a very long delay to avoid getting it set as read. However, Mac Mail, doesn't have this feature. So you have to manually mark messages as unread once you read them. You can remove the preview window so that messages don't get automatically set to read..

Yeah that's where I'm at now, having to click unread. I realize I'm trying to do something strange though so not surprised Mac Mail doesn't have it for me.

Actually I don't think any client specifically has a feature to read an email and not mark it as read. You can work around it by using long delays or other means, but traditionally most people will want to have the email marked as read so that it is in the right state if they were to access the same emails from someplace else and don't have to re-read through all the messages again..

Yeah it's an odd request isnt it? But hopefully you see the logic

Yes, I can totally see your use of it. But then you also know that an e-mail isn't really the medium to be shared like you are using it, so hard to accommodate a very unorthodox use of email..

If this is a long term situation where you need to share a messaging means with someone else, perhaps you should explore other avenues of collaboration?