I recommend that you try conditional formatting rules that help you keep your Inbox more organized.

The different sizes and colors help me see the most important emails and leave the others for later. Here are the results of what these look like in my Inbox. I repeated these steps to create conditional formatting for mail where I am on the To line with other people, mail that I was on the CC line, and mail that was sent to a specific distribution list (DL) instead of directly to me. Because these are the most important messages, I chose a red color and a larger, bold font.

Next, I clicked Condition and then specified that I want this to apply for messages where I am the only person on the To line.Īfter clicking OK, I clicked Font and then selected how I want the text to appear in the message list.

I first created a formatting rule for mail that is sent only to me, so after clicking Add, I named it “Only You.” Click Add to create a conditional formatting rule. To set up Conditional Formatting from your Inbox, on the View tab, in the Current View group, click View Settings, and then click Conditional Formatting. For that reason you might want to set these messages to appear larger than others in your Inbox. By adding your own customizations, you can highlight the messages that are most important to you.įor example, when you are at work, emails that are sent directly to you and no one else are probably some of the more important messages for you to review. By default, conditional formatting makes unread messages bold. This advice comes straight out of the Outlook Best Practices – a series of guidelines to help you be as productive as possible with Outlook.Ĭonditional Formatting allows you to customize how different messages appear in your Inbox message list based on criteria that you set. This week I wanted to share another tool for making sure the right email messages stick out when you’re reading down the message list in your Inbox. Last month I wrote about how to quickly create rules to help rid your Inbox of so-called graymail. ( Our numbers tell us that many people want to learn about conditional formatting in Outlook–a clear explanation is below–so we’re moving this post back into the top spot to better share it with all of you.)

Outlook conditional formatting if else