Recently, I was working with someone who receives a lot of email. Because of the sheer amount of email she receives, she must prioritize what messages she can read in order to continue working effectively. The request came in to see if it were possible to auto-categorize emails in Outlook based on the sender of the email so that one could simply glance through the inbox and see (by color) what emails had come in. After looking at it for a bit, we set up a Outlook Rule to color categorize an email as soon as it came in if the email was on a list of senders manually added to the rule. This worked fine until we reached the size limit of the Outlook Rule.

The fix is quite simple. Create a new local Address Book with all the recipients you’d like to color code. Then, set your Outlook Rule to scan the address book for a sender to color code the email. [more]