Phil online

I like to use coloring rules, such as they are, in Outlook at work.  I want to use coloring rules in Thunderbird, too, but I find them limiting.  Thunderbird colors email when it is given a label.  But you can only have five different labels in Thunderbird.

The default labels are Work, Personal, Important, To Do, and Later.  I don’t care so much about the names since I don’t normally display them, but the colors for these are rather garish.

But I discovered that you can change not only the label name but also the color.  Someone even posted a Chrome hack to change the color from the foreground color to the background color.  Neat — I may try that later.

But for now, I just needed a few little changes.  First, the list.  Open up Tools -> Options and click on the Display icon, then the Labels tab.
Work - I’ll put all my server notices here like Cron reports
Groups - I’ve been putting group mail in “Later”.  Now I’ll rename it. 
Important - Email from my 2am friends.
Impersonal - “Newsletters” that aren’t quite spam
To Do - Not sure what to do with this yet, since I use the IMAP flag.

Now the colors.  I want Impersonal stuff and groups to be muted, so I set those to pastel colors.  Work is a pastel orange.  Important is Fire Engine Red.

Ok, now I need some rules.  I already have rules for most of the labels; let me add one for Impersonal mail.

Whoa…  That’s a lot of impersonal mail.  I think I should start unsubscribing from these (or sending them to /dev/null).  That’s a job for another day…
Next, I go to the Tools -> Filter Messages dialog and Run the new filter on my email.   Voila, my email is all magically colored.

Now Thunderbird will automatically label (and color) the email as it arrives on my computer.  I like how it does this even for my IMAP messages.  (My friend Bob Rankin says it doesn’t do this for him, but I guess this is a feature they’ve “fixed” since then.)

This entry was posted on Friday, January 26th, 2007 at 10:33 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.