Hello
When scrolling through old emails in Mail I found some emails
with background colors which I never assigned to them:
What do these colors (brown, blue) mean?
How can I remove the colors?
Note: Could this have happened when updating from an earlier Mail/OS X version...?
Many thanks.
coxorange wrote:
Hello
When scrolling through old emails in Mail I found some emails
with background colors which I never assigned to them:
What do these colors (brown, blue) mean?
How can I remove the colors?
Note: Could this have happened when updating from an earlier Mail/OS X version...?
Many thanks.
Brown means "Junk"
Blue means "Unread"
Colours are used in Mail to identify related messages.
Go to Mail / Preferences / Viewing. You select the colour.
In earlier versions this was called (I think) threading. Called Highlight messages in Mail 7.1
Hmm... How likely is it that rebuilding would help at all in this case?
I can't risk to lose about 500 "unread" marks of my 17,000 emails in the inbox.
I could imagine a method for moving my unread mails somewhere else temporarily, but then I'm afraid that after rebuilding and moving mails, Time Machine would backup the 17,000 mails + attachments once again, wasting a lot of space on my backup drive.
A suggestion: Create a new test Mailbox and copy a few of those coloured ones and put them in that mailbox. (Hold the Option key down as you drag and drop,ensures the emails are copied to the new folder while the originals remain where they are.)
This way you can try stuff like Rebuild on the test mailbox without any danger of losing emails. You only need to test a few. When you are done you can delete the test mb.
You could turn Time Machine off for a brief period while you are doing the tests.
Csound1 wrote:
Brown means Junk.
Rightclick on a Brown one, select 'Mark as not Junk' unless it is Junk.
When I rightclick a brown one, there is no 'Mark as not Junk' option to selct - just 'Mark > As Junk Mail', but even this menu item is shown greyed = unavailable.
'Tis true... How do you remove the brown color markings when there is no option to "mark as Not Junk" option?
EDIT: Never mind, I figured it out... You need to click/select the message you want to change then use the color wheel to select the backgroud color as being white. Annoying. =Obviously a bug Apple should fix.
Ed M. wrote:
'Tis true... How do you remove the brown color markings when there is no option to "mark as Not Junk" option?
EDIT: Never mind, I figured it out... You need to click/select the message you want to change then use the color wheel to select the backgroud color as being white. Annoying. =Obviously a bug Apple should fix.
Or you could just mark it as "Not Junk", which is much easier.
Thank you. How can I turn this feature off?
I checked Mail / Preferences / Viewing and it looks like:
Check the Highlight messages .... box, then click the blue box to the right of that text.
Next select the colour chart and select white from the list of colours.
Now, suddenly, the third color (royal blue) has appeared for the first time,
and I don't know why and how to remove it. Here is a screenshot:
Please help!
Many thanks.
Thanks for your suggestion.
Unfortunately this had no influence on the messages which were already marked in brown and blue (as decribed above).
Any other idea...?
When all esle fails in Mail I try the Rebuild command.
You select a Mailbox on the left, go to Mialbox in the menu bar, there select Rebuild.
Brown means Junk.
Rightclick on a Brown one, select 'Mark as not Junk' unless it is Junk.
I tried that and Rebuild didn't change anything.
Any other ideas how to remove the colors...? Thanks.
Mail - What do the colors mean?
