How to Add or Remove Background Color of Email Messages in Your Message List in Apple Mail

How to Add or Remove Background Color of Email Messages in Your Message List in Apple Mail
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Here’s how to add and at least as importantly how to remove the background color of email messages in your message list in Apple Mail on your Mac. Let’s say that you want to color code the messages in your inbox or other mailbox on your Mac in Apple Mail, maybe red for email from your boss, yellow for aunt Sally, and green for your kid who’s away at college and always asking for money.

(Note that this is different from color coding the color of the mailboxes themselves, which you can’t do but you can code them with emojis!)

First, it’s very easy to color code these sorts of emails by assigning each type of email its own message list background color in your Apple Mail rules.

How to Color Code Email by Adding a Background Color to Messages in Your Message List

Go to Mail > Preferences > Rules

Create a new rule based on the email address, or some specific word or phrase, and then select ‘Perform the following actions:’

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Set Color > of background > (whatever color you want)

 

how to change background color of email message in message list on mac mail apple

 

You can do this with as many rules as you like. As you can see, we tend to color-code spam to make it easy to identify it and easy to delete it.

 

rules to change background color of email messages in message list inbox mailbox

 

So that’s how to add color backgrounds to color code certain types of email in your email message list.

How to Set a Background Color for Just a Single Message

What if you want to highlight just one specific email in your message list, maybe the one that includes your kid’s Paypal address to send them that money while they are away at college?

You do that from the message list itself. Just select the message that you want to highlight and then go up to the menu bar and select ‘Format > Show Colors’. This will bring up the color palette from which you can select any color.

 

how to highlight background color individual single email in message list apple mail mac

 

Click on the color you want, and the individual message will then be highlighted with that background color. In this case we chose to use red, because spam makes us see red.

 

highlighted single email message with color apple mac mail

 

But the really tricky bit is this: suppose that you created a rule that turned the background of all email of a certain type a certain color, and now you want to undo that rule. You can uncheck or even delete that rule under Mail > Preferences > Rules, but that will not clear the colored background from email that you have already received! So here’s what you need to do.

How to Remove a Highlighted Background Color from Email in Your Messages List in Apple Mail

To remove the background color from previously highlighted messages you have to go into the message list and select the colored messages and reset the color to white. What we have found is that if you have several different highlight colors, as in our image below, you have to select all of the images of one color, reset those to white, then select all of the messages that have a different color, reset those to white, and so on. So for example in our image below, in order to remove the background highlight colors we had to first select all of the orange highlighted messages, and set those to white (using the color picker from Format > Show Colors). Then we selected all of the ones with a pink background and reset those to white. Lather, rinse, repeat.

 

How to Add or Remove Background Color of Email Messages in Your Message List in Apple Mail

 

Depending on your OS, version of the app, etc., once you have selected a bunch of email messages you may have to use this trick to deselect them.

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