Color code email messages
Today I saw this post on Lifehacker about color coding messages addressed to you in Microsoft Outlook. It made me think that I should share a slight modification in Thunderbird that I have been doing for quite some time. I reverse the method that is proposed in the post. I choose to ‘un-highlight’ messages that are not explicitly for me, by turning them a lighter color. This way I can scan my emails very quickly and see those are that more than likely something I need to pay attention to.
I do this solely in my work email account. Like many people, I am subscribed to many email lists within the company that send mail that I don’t need to respond to immediately, if at all. I belong to lists about IT, general facility information, and the like. What I do is use the under-used Labels function of Thunderbird, in conjunction with a special filter.
First, I like to edit the color for the pre-defined label “Later” to make it a little more muted. Do this by going into Tools > Options > Display > Labels. I like to use the light grey third from the top on the far left. Click the image to see a larger screenshot.
Now, any mail messages that are labeled “Later” will appear in the light color you can see behind the dialog box in the screenshot.
The next step is to create an email filter that labels messages that aren’t for you. In my case, there are certain mailing lists that are very important to me and I should treat them as directly to me. Therefore I create the mail filter to label messages that aren’t to me or to any of these special lists. To do this, go to Tools > Message Filters and hit New…. The following screenshot shows a sample of what my filter would look like. Click the image to see a larger screenshot.
Combining this approach with keeping the Inbox relatively clear can do wonders. Not only do you actually see a smaller amount of messages, but the ones aren’t that really needing attention don’t grab it as much.
Hope someone enjoys and can use this!
March 6th, 2006 at 12:23 pm
I do something similar but instead of color coding, I created folders for messages not sent to me and when they come in they automatically go to these folders. That way the inbox stays fairly clean, and consists of just the stuff sent directly to me.
March 6th, 2006 at 2:49 pm
I use the color feature in Firefox to code each message as it comes in:
1 - answer very soon
2 - answer eventually
3 - contains info relevant to my schedule
4 - contains data relevant to an on-going project
5 - ready to be archived
I use the default colors for 1-4, but a light gray color for 5. using grey for 5 makes the important ones (1-4) stand out. When new messages come in I either discard them immediately or attach a code. When I have time to handle messages I either discard a message that no longer useful, or reclassify as a 5 if I want to keep it. At the end of the day I archive all of the 5’s.
March 6th, 2006 at 6:21 pm
Ed,
That’s a great idea. I had thought about something similar but only wanted to go one step at first to see if it’d be useful. Then the inertia just kept me going with “what works”.
I’ll give it a shot. Although I’ll have to take some care in picking a good color palette. I’m colorblind so I have to handpick some appropriate colors
Thanks,
carl
March 7th, 2006 at 1:50 am
Some additional notes: On Linux Thunderbird, the options are under Edit->Preferences and then choose Display from the left sidebar, the labels will be in the final panel of the resulting dialog.
Tools->Message filter is the same.
It’s possible the linux version I have (1.07) has a bug here, because it’s labelling everything as later, even though I checked the headers and it should not match on directly sent stuff, and I’ve checked for misspellings. I’ll see what 1.5 does, but just a note to other linux users…
March 17th, 2006 at 3:48 am
Organizing email sent directly to you…
Organize email in Outlook by “graying out” items not sent directly to you.
……
June 23rd, 2006 at 8:43 am
Thanks for the instructions on color-coding–I’ve just switched jobs and my new organization uses Thunderbird. Being wedded to the color-coding feature in Groupwise, I was hoping something similar existed for Thunderbird. Your explanation was great!
November 10th, 2006 at 1:13 pm
I tried the positive approach to this - I want to color mail that has only me as the recipient in Thunderbird 1.5.0.8. I created a filter that checked for mail that matches both of two patterns., one where the To field starts with userid@example.com, and one where the To field ends with userid@example.com, and then labels the mail so it can be colored.
Unfortunately, this still selects mail with multiple To addresses. This makes me think suspicious thoughts about the regex behind the filters in Thunderbird.
Anyone ever seen this work?
~Matt
December 12th, 2006 at 7:30 pm
nice color tips thanks !
March 9th, 2007 at 8:40 am
Matt Doar: Try putting your email address in the filter that says “is” instead of “contains” - should do the trick.
cheers
March 21st, 2007 at 7:20 pm
[…] Color Coding/Filtering E-mail in Mozilla Thunderbird […]
January 2nd, 2008 at 8:11 am
hello..
thanks
April 1st, 2008 at 8:28 pm
[…] How to Color-Code E-mail in Thunderbird […]
May 6th, 2008 at 8:10 am
On Thunderbird Message Filters vs. regexp (cf. Matt Doar), I have actually been looking for a way to use regexps in filters.
I need to do a filter on mail where the TO field “contains”
“user1@host.tld” or “user2@host.tld” or… general case “usernn@host.ltd”
or possibly user@host1.tld or user@host2.tld
The regexp would be something like “user[0-9]@host[0-9].tld”.
Now I haven’t been able to use this in a filter. Does anyone have a hint somewhere ?