Manage Your Inbox With Colors
We’ve previously written on
Outlook Rules and how to use them to handle emails by moving them to folders
other than the Inbox. But some of our clients complain that moving
emails to another folder makes them forget to respond—especially if the
folder can’t be seen without scrolling. Out of sight, out of mind…
You can use another tool to highlight rather than move or delete your
emails. If you go to Tools > Organize shown below, you should see three
tabs. Click on the middle one, Using Colors.
You can set the font color of your emails to different colors based on rules
like who it’s from or who it’s to (obviously it’s to YOU, but it might not
be
only you). From the main window shown above, you can only set colors in
a very limited way, but at the top right corner of the window, you can
see Automatic Formatting… Click there for more options.
When the Automatic Formatting dialog box comes up, click on Add to create a
new formatting condition, give it a name (something more descriptive than
New Color Format Rule) and then click on Condition…
.
From here, you can Add rules for the view based on content, sender, category
and other information. For instance, emails containing the phrase "Comdex"
or "trade show" can be colored in purple and set in Courier font. Emails
containing "past due" can be shown in bold red font.
Be careful with these and use them judiciously… there’s only so long you can
stare at an Inbox with lime green, fuchsia, sky blue and yellow subject
lines.
Good luck!