Pop3 and read status

Hi,
I had the problem that the webmail does not provide any spam
filtering. I would have to do that on the server in order to archieve
that. But I don't want to because Thunderbird and Mac OS X Mail do a
very nice job on that. So I setup a google account which fetches the
mail from my server using pop3. This works very well as the google web
interface is very decent and fast. But it has one disadvantage. The
mail is marked read which is quite confusing as I can not see if I
really read a message or not. I tried forwarding the mail to the
google account, but I guess when I used that for another account it
felt spammed by my domain. At least the spam filtering in google
marked everything as spam.
While I can specify in google mail to keep the mails on my server I
can not specify how courier treats the read status.
So to put question short, is there a way to fetch the mail (and keep
it in my inbox) using pop3 but not mark it as read?

Thanks in advance,
Karsten