Color can change your life … or at least your email

I, personally, love this little trick.  Many of my friends and family didn’t know this existed till I showed it to them.  Though… to be fair… I didn’t know this existed till someone showed it to me.  I am a firm believer in taking people’s great ideas and sharing them with anyone that wants them.  Knowledge is a terrible thing to waste, as they say.

This simple suggestion will allow you add color and/or fonts to your emails, which helps certain senders or topics to stand out from the crowd.  After being off a few days, how many times have sat at your computer to read email and wished there was an easy way to spot your bosses emails from the tons of others?  To help this, I mark my boss in red to help make sure I can easily find those first. 

I will offer instructions on how to do this in Outlook 2016. I am also sure that there may be ways to set this in your email system (if different from mine), but I am currently using Outlook, so that is what I can speak about.

• Click the View menu - from your inbox
• Click View Settings in the Current View group
• In the resulting dialog, click Conditional Formatting
• Click Add
• Give the new format a descriptive name
• Click Font
• You can assign other formats, but in this case, we want to color the message - that's a Font attribute
• From the Color dropdown, choose a color
• Click OK
• Now that you have the color, you need the condition
• Click Condition (under Font)
• In this case, you want to colorize messages from your boss
• You can pick the email address from your address book or type it in
• Click OK three times to return to the Mail window

Adding the color is a simple enough task, but if you move the message to another folder, Outlook removes the color; it stops applying the rule. To keep the color from folder to folder, you can copy the rule to other folders as follows:

• In the Inbox, click View
• From the Change View option dropdown, choose Apply Current View to Other Mail Folders
• In the Apply View dialog, expand the Inbox and check the appropriate folders
• Click “apply view to subfolders” if you want that option
• or, click individual folders
• Click OK

Over the years, I have played with fonts and other options over the years. I think that changing the font styles is a bit less effective in quickly scanning your mailbox … but play with it.  You might find that you like different font styles, along with colors, in your mailbox.