Mail Coloring

I deal with a lot of email in a day, and I’ve always been a huge believer in using the power of a computer to make life easier by automating the prioritization and triage of material to my attention. Surprisingly to most people though, I don’t have that many mail client rules that automatically folder messages based on the subject or what not. I proactively make sure that I’m only subscribed to lists that actively deliver information I’m interested in and that are time-sensitive. If a message is of low-enough importance that I can automatically file out of my inbox then its low-importance enough to ignore completely.

The one type of mail filter I do use actively is the (I believe) little-used capability in most mail clients to automatically apply colors/labels to messages matching certain criteria. Receiving well north of a hundred or more real emails a day, automatically highlighting messages that are specifically to me is a very effective way to triage things that probably need a more urgent response than the latest “There’s a car with its lights on” message.

I use Green to symbolize messages where I’m in the To: field, Blue for messages where I’m Cc’d, and Purple (a new one) for messages to mail aliases where I am the primary responder. Anything in black was to a group list and is (likely) of lower priority.

Enabling this feature is different on each mail client, but I know its easy to do on OSX Mail.app and Entourage, and I even originally learned this trick on Unix Pine (actually using a + and a – next to messages to annotate if I was on the To: or Cc: list.