Color coding incoming mail (Office XP)

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I color-code my incoming mail and view it in the preview mode (1st 2-3 lines of message show). I have somehow hit a wall — it tells me that I cannot add anymore addresses to a color (i.e. those from my personal list are colored blue, from my librarians’ list serve are green, etc.) I cannot add a new person to my personal “blue” list. As a migrant from Entourage/Mac I’m stumped, since Entourage (pretty much the Mac version of Outlook) allows setting up categories by name AND color and seems to be almost limitless.

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How are you setting up your formatting rules? This is my process; I certainly don’t claim it is the most efficient, but I wonder whether we are doing the same thing:

1. Open the Organize pane (click toolbar button or use Tools>Organize)
2. Click Using Colors and then Automatic Formatting…
3. To create a new category, click Add, give it a name, click Font…, give it a typeface, size and color
4. Click Condition…, then Advanced tab, then add “From” “contains” (or Is (exactly), depending on the situation) and the display name associated with the sender, repeatedly, until finished with that category.

How many do you have when it says you can’t have any more?

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Ah — there were a few steps in your method that I wasn’t using. I was just “assigning” a color and making it active. I don’t know how many I had, but I will certainly try your steps and see if that solves my problem. Thanks for the detailed answer.
Joyce

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More exploration under color-coding/advanced formatting: there are 5 “rules” that cannot be deleted, even if you wanted to. It appears that the limit is 30 rules, including those five. Still doesn’t meet my needs — I would like fifty or so. (Each rule is counted, even if you’re using the same color — e.g. all my genealogy-related messages are fucsia color, altho’ they’re from at least 4 different sources.

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Can you combine all of the genealogy messages into one rule using the Advanced tab? I attach a silly example of what I mean.

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Can you combine all of the genealogy messages into one rule using the Advanced tab? I attach a silly example of what I mean.

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Wonderful!! That’s exactly what I was looking for, but I would never have thought of applying “filter” to an incoming message condition. Many thanks.
Joyce

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Wonderful!! That’s exactly what I was looking for, but I would never have thought of applying “filter” to an incoming message condition. Many thanks.
Joyce

Reply | Quote

More exploration under color-coding/advanced formatting: there are 5 “rules” that cannot be deleted, even if you wanted to. It appears that the limit is 30 rules, including those five. Still doesn’t meet my needs — I would like fifty or so. (Each rule is counted, even if you’re using the same color — e.g. all my genealogy-related messages are fucsia color, altho’ they’re from at least 4 different sources.

Reply | Quote

Ah — there were a few steps in your method that I wasn’t using. I was just “assigning” a color and making it active. I don’t know how many I had, but I will certainly try your steps and see if that solves my problem. Thanks for the detailed answer.
Joyce

Reply | Quote

How are you setting up your formatting rules? This is my process; I certainly don’t claim it is the most efficient, but I wonder whether we are doing the same thing:

1. Open the Organize pane (click toolbar button or use Tools>Organize)
2. Click Using Colors and then Automatic Formatting…
3. To create a new category, click Add, give it a name, click Font…, give it a typeface, size and color
4. Click Condition…, then Advanced tab, then add “From” “contains” (or Is (exactly), depending on the situation) and the display name associated with the sender, repeatedly, until finished with that category.

How many do you have when it says you can’t have any more?

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