Do you want important emails to stand out visually from the list of other emails in your inbox? Suppose you want to make the text larger for the emails that come from a specific person in your organization and have the words “revenue” in the message. With the help of Outlook conditional formatting, you can do exactly that.
Note that conditional formatting only applies to the way emails look among the list of other emails. It’s merely a “view” setting and does not actually modify the formatting of the content within the email.
Here’s how to use conditional formatting in Outlook:
When in Outlook (Mail), go to the view tab from the top ribbon, and from “current view” section, click on “View Settings” to open all settings related to “View.”
From this ‘settings’ window, open ‘Conditional formatting.’
You will get a setting dialog box for all the conditional formatting. It will look like shown in the screenshot below:
There are couple of default conditional formatting that you will find here already. Such as unread messages, unread group headers, expired email, overdue email, and more. These are ones that Outlook has built-in by default. You can modify the font for each of these pre-built ones but cannot delete them. What you can do however is turn them off by unchecking the boxes before them. This temporarily disables the conditional formatting for those particular emails.
Create Your Own Conditional Formatting
To create your own conditional formatting, click on ‘Add,’ which will create another ‘rule’ for viewing emails. Give it a name based on whatever you want this to be, for example: “show in red from manager.”
Click on ‘Font’ and choose what font you want, style, size, color, Script, strikeout, and underline. Click “OK.”
To specify the conditions, click on the “conditions” box below the “font” box.
Here you can specify exactly the conditions for the incoming emails that you want to see with your preferred formatting.
You have a lot of options to set the conditions. The “Message” tab allows you to specify the sender of the message, what words to look for in the message, and even time of the message.
From the “more choices” tab, you have choices such as specifying the categories for emails as conditions, or consider only unread emails, or only consider emails with attachments, and many more.
Click “OK” for all three open Windows to close them all. Now, whenever you will receive emails that match the specified conditions, those will be shown with the specified formatting. This will help you to easily spot the important emails that you don’t want to ignore among the massive list of other emails that are not so important. It can also help you with email management. Try setting different color font for different senders for much more efficient management of emails.