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.

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A tip on macOSXHints shows you how to create a coloured signature in Apple Mail.

This only works, obviously, if you email in Rich Text.

In the comments, another poster links to the older macOSXHints tip on creating more complicated HTML signatures , saving them as web archives and manually copying them into your Mail folder.

Or you could follow this tutorial on inserting a graphic into your signature provided by a Skype user, but useful for any graphic not just Skype promos. (You could, but now it requires you to log on with a Skype account. Shame.)

It goes without saying that restraint and good taste are crucial in this matter. Don’t do this.

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