Colourise Mail.app messages for visual queues
Rob Griffiths at MacWorld posts a great tip 
for the ad-hoc colouring of messages.
I use the coloured message background feature of Mail.app a lot, and find that it helps me balance the overall grasp which a unified Inbox offers me with the ability quickly to zero in on the messages in a particular account.
Mostly I do this with a combination of rules that colour every email coming into a particular account and with MailTags keyword colours (powered by Mail Act-on rules).
But every now and then something unusual comes in that needs a colour of its own.
Rob shows you how to do that quickly with the Colour Picker (Command-Shift-C).
The end result is a technicolour bonanza that might not appeal to everyone, but which helps me find what I want quickly:
Click image for the full colour explosion!
Try it out. You’ll find it useful too.
Tags: Apple Mail, Apple Mail Tips, color, color picker, colour, email, mail.app, messagesRelated posts
May 19th, 2006 at 12:04 pm
Wouldn’t it be nice if MailTags could have colors associated with keywords, projects, duedates, priority etc, and that these could be adjusted via preferences (ie not having to assign a color to a message).
And they could be ordered so that things due today would automagically appear in red even if the project was regularly blue.
hmmmmm….
May 19th, 2006 at 12:17 pm
Yes, Sir, that would be very nice. :)
May 19th, 2006 at 12:20 pm
….also, to accommodate lazy or “over-committed” people like me, it would be very nice if MailTags has a separate colour for things that are overdue.
May 20th, 2006 at 12:44 am
Before I went over to MacOsX I had been using Eudora for years on Os9. I always missed the possibility to color my mail. Actually Thunderbird can do that – using the keyboard too. Then one day I though of using the built in color palette. What a relief!
I wrote about this just over a month ago on my site http://font.is/?p=99, unfortunately it’s written in Icelandic, but you might want to look at the palette there. I use a much lighter colors for marking the mail as dark colors and very saturated tend to make it harder to read.
I always try to limit the number of mails I colorize. The only really bright color I use is yellow which I use for very urgent matters I have to do and when finished I make it white again.
May 20th, 2006 at 1:00 pm
smorr! Your still in the around. Great! I hadn’t seen any post by you on the MailTags Trac for a while and I was afraid you had moved on. Just so you know I am one (of I sure many) MailTags users who rely on you to make Mail.app a great mail client.
“Wouldn’t it be nice if MailTags could have colors associated with keywords, projects, due dates, priority etc, and that these could be adjusted via preferences (i.e. not having to assign a color to a message).
And they could be ordered so that things due today would automagically appear in red even if the project was regularly blue.”
YES! That would be great. You have me salivating.
I would also like to be able to create an Event (as well as the current To Do/Tasks) using MailTags.
Thanks for all your efforts.
June 1st, 2007 at 11:41 am
I love the simplicity of this tip - something I can start using straight away. Cool how the keystroke is super similar to the send keystroke - so the fingers are ready to go without having to work too hard.
Much appreciated!