Outlook 2016 Coloring Rules How To Use Them

You can also apply rules to make Outlook display messages in different ways based on their properties (like the sender, subject line, or timestamp).

For example, you can see that Unread messages are displayed in bold, blue Segoe UI font with a size of 11 points.

In the default rules, for example, the Unread Messages rule is activated when a message is marked as unread.

When that rule is activated, Outlook uses the bold, blue, 11-point Segoe UI font to display it.

Rules higher up on the list take precedence over rules lower down.

If a message meets the conditions of both rules, the font will be changed to green because that rule is higher up on the listthe rule which sets the font to red is ignored.

You cant delete default rules, or move the order around, or change the conditions for the rule.

You can turn default rules off though, by unchecking them in the Rules for this view list.

Set yours up however you want, click the OK button, click OK again to close the Conditional Formatting window, and then one more time to close the Advanced View Settings window.

You can see below that messages meeting our conditions are now bold and purple.

Back in that Filter window, you can switch over to the More Choices tab to see a bunch of additional conditions you can pick.

This could be quite simple, such as matching the sender to an exact address, but you have a lot of options to choose from.

Lets say you want your rule to match emails that you received.

Click the Field button, point to DateTime Fields, and then click the Received option.

To give you some idea of how many fields there are, heres a look at just the All Mail fields menu.

Outlook 2016 Coloring Rules How To Use Them

So were not going to go through each of the fields and conditions, but now you know where they are and how to use them.

Want to have Outlook display messages in a red 16pt font if they are from a certain contact, received in the last seven days, contain a specific word in the subject, and include an attachment Not a problem.

In the Conditional Formatting window, select the rule you want to delete and click the Delete button.

Just remember that you can only delete rules youve creatednot Outlooks built-in default rules.

And as we showed you before, once youve got the conditional formatting rules set up the way you want then you can copy the view to another folder, or to all folders if you want.

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Outlook 2016 For Mac Coloring Rules