POP Email integration - Outlook emails showing as read

POP Email integration - Outlook emails showing as read

We have switched to a CRM with Zoho and completed the POP integration so that all of our emails are being saved into the CRM. The challenge is now, all of our emails are coming in as read into Outlook.

I understand IMAP is the recommended solution but for our purposes we want all email records pushed into the system and to remain there for historical purposes.

Im curious if there is a difference between the Outlook and Office365 integrations as well for mail?

We have tried message handling within outlook to always keep things as read, and it still bypasses that option