MAC TREAT #69: Flag Email With Colors!

Mac Treats are meant to be quick and easy “how to” tips for getting more from your Mac on a daily basis. Many of these Treats elicit a “wow, I didn’t know you could do that!” reaction from readers. I find it oddly satisfying to discover, harness, and share the seemingly hidden features of Mac OS X. Occasionally, I stumble across an OS X feature that all my fellow Mac users seem to know – except for me.

For example: in Apple’s Mail program, did you know you can easily color code email messages in your inbox? This is useful if you want to flag certain messages for appropriate responses.

I just learned that you can manually do this by selecting an email, then pressing Command-Shift-C. The Apple color chooser window will pop up. You can use the color wheel to choose a color, but for this task I prefer the “crayon” view in the color chooser. In Mail, you can also get the color window to open by navigating to the menu bar at the top of the screen and choosing “Format > Choose Colors.”

It’s also easy to get Mail to automatically flag email by color as it enters your inbox. For example, lets say you’re married but have a boyfriend or mistress, and you don’t want their emails to get mixed up. Wait, no, don’t use that example.

Let’s say you want email from your boss to be flagged with green. In Mail’s menu at the top of the screen, click on Preferences, then in the window that opens, click Rules (note that sometimes the Rules button is hidden far to the right, and you have to drag the window larger to see it). Click “Add Rule”, choose the input criteria, and under “Perform the following actions” choose “Set Color of Message” in the drop-down menu. You may need to adjust the input critereia to make this work perfectly.

This is an easy way to make sure important emails stand out in your probably-swamped inbox. Feel free to flag Kibbles with red, meaning “read now!”