Color-code Outlook Emails

Color-code Outlook Emails: A member asked…

Hi Chris, I have Outlook 2010 installed, and I have emails forwarded to it from several accounts. I use a gmail address for emails from a volunteer job and I want to watch out for those emails. So I’d like to set it up so that any emails sent to my gmail address are colored red. Is this easy to do?

Microsoft changed the way this handy feature works in the 2010 version – a bit more work than it used to be but by no means difficult. Here’s what you’ll do:

1. Go to Outlook’s View menu
2. Create a rule with conditions to show emails sent to a specific address in a different color

You’ll have already setup Gmail to forward emails to your primary email account, so they should appear in your Outlook inbox. But it’ll be hard to tell which emails were sent to which email address (your gmail address or your primary email address), since the columns that your inbox display has don’t include the “To” column normally.

You can add this by right-clicking any of the column headers and clicking on “Field Chooser”, then finding the “To” entry (on the little window that pops up), and dragging that to any spot between column headers in your inbox. Let go and the To column is now where you placed it (and you can close out the little Field Chooser window).

If you need to first setup Gmail to forward emails to your primary email account, it’s three quick steps:

1. Open Gmail in your web browser, and click the gear icon near the top-right of the window, then click Settings
2. Across the upper-part of the settings window are tabbed settings sections. Click the Forwarding and POP/IMAP item
3. Click the 2nd item “Forward a copy…” and fill in your primary email address, then open the box to the right and choose whether you want emails saved or not. Then scroll to the bottom of the page and click “Save Changes”.

Now to get your Outlook inbox to show emails colored differently, the first thing to do is get to where you can change the view settings in your Outlook inbox:

1. Be in your inbox view,
2. Click the menu item “View” and then
3. Click the “View Settings button, and then the Conditional Formatting button

Now you can create a rule to change the color of messages in the inbox listing. There are a lot of different criteria you could apply, and they all are controlled by the Conditional Formatting option:

1. In the new window that opens, click the Add button, and then name your rule (or condition), such as “Mail from Gmail”. Then click the Font button, which opens another window.
2. In that new window, click open the color list by clicking the right corner of the list (it’ll say “Black”). That expands to show you a list of colors, so just pick the one you want (like Red). Then click the OK button at the top right to close that window.
3. Now click the Condition button, which opens a different new window. Look for the space to the right of the button “Sent To” and type in the email address of your gmail account. Then click OK to close that window, OK to close the Conditional Formatting Window, and OK to close the Advanced View Settings window.

That’s it, from now on, all emails in your inbox that are sent to that email address will be colored red. you can repeat these steps to set more different colors for other emails as you want, Outlook stores as many rules as you care to create.