Outlook Inbox Tips: Mail Shading Differences

Microsoft Outlook 2002 and above offers a rich set of inbox management settings that customize the look of your inbox to suit your needs. In a common Outlook 2002 inbox, we can see that underlined emails belong to the same email thread. ("Threading" refers to a series of emails that start with an email that was originally received and includes all responses to the email.) However, threads are very difficult to master because emails are sorted by date.

The solution to this problem is to first group the emails by thread and then sort by date to provide a better and clearer management method. You can also color some emails to help you quickly identify them. Last time we introduced the Outlook Inbox organization technique: sort by thread, today we will look at how to color emails.

The role of coloring emails

The speed at which you reply to an email usually depends on who sent the email and who is the recipient of the email. For example, if an email was sent by your manager and you are the only recipient, you will most likely need to respond to the message quickly.

In addition, you may want to take a glance (without actually opening an email) to know if the recipient of the email is you or a group. You can do this by coloring the email. You can easily modify your inbox view to display shaded notifications by formatting the email font color.
How to Color Emails

1. On the Tools menu, click Organize to display the How to Organize Inbox task pane.

2. Click "Use Color".

3. Click on the email in the Inbox and you will see the list of senders displayed in the "Color the message" box. Alternatively, you can enter your own name in the "Color the message" box.

4. Select a color from the list.

5. Click Apply Color.

6. To color an email that is only sent to you, select a color from the "Show emails only sent to me" list. Click "Open" to set the color. To undo the color settings, click Close.

In this example, the message from Jay Adams is set to red, the email sent to me only is set to blue, and the email sent to the team is set to black.

Note To undo or select a different color, follow the steps above and reselect your color preferences.