I was wondering if its possible to have messages that get sorted (by rules that I have already set up) to a specific folder can be marked as read when they come in?

I have never heard of this being done, and am fairly sure its not possible because microsoft probably thinks every e-mail you get is one you want to read.

The reason I am asking is after 5 years of having my university e-mail address I accumulate somewhere around 20 spam messages a day. My university has a spam filter before it ever gets to my computer that puts a flag in the header so I can sort it in Outlook. Well these messages are sorted to a Spam folder in Outlook, but what I wish could happen is that when I get a spam e-mail its already marked as read so I don't have that unopened mail notification in my system tray.

Probably not possible, but if any of you know people that develop software for Microsoft this is something they should definately look into.

Yes you can SNGX. Go into your actual rule and you should see during the action step of your rule there is an option called "mark it as read" right underneath "start application"

Cool, problem solved. Thanks