What's the point of having the widget or Maemo shows you the contents of the text message if you still have to go in it for it to be marked as read?

Is there or can we develop a way of marking text messages as read in a more convenient way?

Like if you close the preview window of an incoming text message instead of pressing on it, it would mark it as read.

I don't even mind having some kind of separate widget to just mark all unread texts as read on your desktop or something.