"The RSS Feeds do not update when they are selected nor are they periodically refreshed in the background."
- From what I can tell this is untrue. My RSS Feeds
have updated in the background on smarterTools. There
is also code that does run every hour to update the
RSS Feeds.
"If you manually refresh using the circle then all items are marked as new."
- This is true. This is due to us caching the unread
states but not storing them on the server. So updating
reloads the cache and thus the unread states. If the
service is restarted this would also remove unread
states.
Tracking and saving individual unread states would require significant changes to the back end of SmarterMail and so this has been added to our feature requests list to be considered at a later date.