As a Mac user in a windows shop, I feel I need to use Mac applications when I can rather than the sometimes better open source alternatives to Microsoft products. I use Firefox because I find it to have two or three critical improvements over Safari, but Safari is getting there. I use iChat for instant messaging and I use Mail for all my email. iChat has its issues, but that's another post. This one's all about Mail.

During the average business day, I receive a multitude of email messages of varying priority. I found that it would be useful to be able to mark priority by color. Many email clients have this ability including Thunderbird, so I felt a little left out by Apple on this one. Searching the Internet, I found details on how to set up filters that will automatically change the color of an incoming email, but that's childsplay. I also found AppleScripts to manually change the color, which seemed like too much of a hack to me.

As it turns out, this functionality is built into Mail.app and, while it's not as user-friendly as a right-click option, it works quite well. Here's how to do it.

• Select the message you wish to change to a different color
• From the Format menu, select Show Colors. ( Shift-Cmd-C )
• Choose your favorite color-picker. I like the crayons
• Choose a color for the message.

It may not look like this did anything right away so choose another message and experience the beauty of your new colors. If you do this a lot during the day, just leave the color picker open so you have quick access to it. You'll need to re-open the color picker the next time you start Mail.app.

Happy coloring!

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