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Health & Fitness

Color me red—and find me fast

Add color to your email senders to find important messages easily.

Microsoft Outlook users: Did you know that you could assign a color to your frequent email senders in order to identify messages that you may want to respond to more quickly? Here is how you can see, at a glance, email from people that you want to pay attention to and at least prioritize these over all of the drivel that passes through your inbox.

  • In Outlook, go to “Tools”
  • Click “Organize”
  • The “Ways to Organize” pane should appear
  • Click “Using Color”
  • Here you can select a message in your inbox and the sender will be highlighted in the display. Select a color and click “Apply Color.” You can also enter the sender's address and apply a selected color in that manner.
  • There is also a field where you may choose to turn colors on for emails that are sent only to you, for example. You can undo this if you find it to be too distracting.
  • To view or edit your color selections or for more advanced features, click on “Automatic Formatting” in the upper right hand corner of the “Ways to Organize” navigation pane.

For those of you who use other email systems, this feature is typically available as well. You will likely not be able to color code every message you receive, nor would you want to, but this tip can help you find the ‘pot of gold’ for those messages that need to be addressed as priority one.

*Note: These instructions are for Outlook 2007. Instructions for your version of Outlook or other email program may be slightly different.

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